It's great to be able to preview your sites and apps locally, but the moment somebody asks you to share it with them, you might wish you'd set up a staging site. Thankfully, there are tools like ngrok and expose that make it easy to share your local development domains with the world. And Valley comes with integrations to these tools baked in. So with a simple Valley share and a little bit of configuration the first time you use it, you'll be up and sharing your Valley apps in no time. With Valley share, you're going to teach Valley which sharing tool you prefer, either ngrok or expose. You'll then authenticate Valley to the tool you're using to prove you have an account.

ngrok or expose. You'll then authenticate Valley to the tool you're using to prove you have an account. And finally, you're going to run valley share from the directory of your app or site. Valley will initiate a sharing session with your share tool and return you the public URL for that site. So let's take a look at a brand new Valley install. The first time you run valley share, it'll prompt you to choose the tool you want to use. At this point, you can either choose ngrok or expose depending on which tool you've decided you want to use.

At this point, you can either choose ngrok or expose depending on which tool you've decided you want to use. So let's take a look at each of the tools to figure out which is the best for you. As far as I know, ngrok actually started this category of tool. They've been around for ages, and they've got a robust set of features, tools, and integrations. And you can check out their site to learn about all the offerings they have, but it's a lot. Expose, on the other hand, is a newer tool. It's been around for a few years, so it's definitely proven, and it's created by a member of the Laravel community, Marcel Poitiot.

It's been around for a few years, so it's definitely proven, and it's created by a member of the Laravel community, Marcel Poitiot. And while it has less features than ngrok, it's more affordable, and it does cover all the use cases that Valley can integrate with. We're going to cover both tools, but we'll start with ngrok because it's a bit more common. First, we're going to tell Valley that we want to use ngrok. Valley, share tool, ngrok. If you don't have ngrok installed already, you're going to get prompted to install it through Homebrew. You can manage your own install of ngrok if you want, but I'm just going to let Homebrew

through Homebrew. You can manage your own install of ngrok if you want, but I'm just going to let Homebrew do it for me. And once this finishes installing, if we were to run valet share right now, we'd get either an error on the local machine, or if we tried to visit it, it would just say, hey, you're not authenticated. So the next thing we need to do is log into our ngrok account and grab the share token. Now, when you're logged into your ngrok dashboard, you can just click right on your auth token, and it's going to be available right here, and you hit copy, and you're going to go back to your command line, and there's a tool available for you that Valet exposes called set ngrok.

and it's going to be available right here, and you hit copy, and you're going to go back to your command line, and there's a tool available for you that Valley exposes called set ngrok token, and then you just paste in your token there, and you're good to go. Now, the first time you run ngrok, if we've installed it through Homebrew, you're going to get this little pop-up, and that's totally normal. All right, so we have our auth token saved locally, so now we can run Valley share, and it should just work. And here's our first view of the ngrok share pane. This is what it looks like when ngrok is sharing your site, and so each of these individual items here is telling you a little bit of information about the fact that it's sharing,

This is what it looks like when ngrok is sharing your site, and so each of these individual items here is telling you a little bit of information about the fact that it's sharing, but when you see this, it's actually working. So your status is online. You can see the account is Tighten Co. because that's my personal one authenticated. You can see where it's serving from, what its latency is once people start using it, and the most important things are these forwarding addresses. Right here, we have the publicly accessible URL, and then on the other side, we have the local URL that it's forwarding to, and it's set to berry.floga.test instead of just floga.test because we set that up in an earlier video.

local URL that it's forwarding to, and it's set to berry.floga.test instead of just floga.test because we set that up in an earlier video. So let's check it out, and look at that, and this is a publicly accessible URL, so you can pass this off to your friends, you can try it out from your phone, or whatever else. So that's it for sharing with ngrok, so let's look at what it's going to look like to share with expose specifically. First thing you want to do is use Ctrl-C to close out our ngrok share session. Let's do a real quick clear to reset everything. Just like with ngrok, we'll use valet share tool expose to define expose as our share tool.

Just like with ngrok, we'll use valet share tool expose to define expose as our share tool. And just like with ngrok, if we don't have expose installed, which we can manage on our own if we want, it'll install it for us, except this time it's going to use composer global install rather than using homebrew. I'm certainly going to let Composer manage it for me. Also just like with ngrok, we need to visit the expose site to grab our auth token before we can actually use valet share with expose. So let's log into our dashboard. So if we scroll down a little bit here, we're going to see the full command we need to run.

So let's log into our dashboard. So if we scroll down a little bit here, we're going to see the full command we need to run to authenticate our local expose install. So I'll copy it, go over to our terminal, hit paste, and now we should be fully authenticated with expose. So if we run valet share, it's going to set us up with a randomized subdomain. If I was paying for expose pro, I would actually get a custom subdomain. That's okay because right now I can just click on this and try it out. And there we go. Just like we had with ngrok, we have a fully accessible public site with a URL that we

And there we go. Just like we had with ngrok, we have a fully accessible public site with a URL that we can copy and share with our friends. There's one more tool that might be helpful for us when we're dealing with valet share, which is fetch share URL. So let's real quick close out that expose session, clear to get everything ready to go and take a look at this tool. If you want to use this next tool, fetch share URL and expose, you have to have a paid plan, which I don't. So I'm going to switch over to ngrok really quickly, valet share tool, ngrok.

which I don't. So I'm going to switch over to ngrok really quickly, valet share tool, ngrok. So the way this tool works is if you have any shares running on the app that you're on right now, you can very quickly get the access to the URL alone, which means you can either get it easily or you can get it programmatically for use in other tools. So if I'm doing a share with ngrok, of course I have access to that there, but sometimes that's open in a different tab or sometimes I may need this information programmatically. So if I wanted to go that same directory and run valet fetch share-url, it's going to go out to ngrok and ask it what URL that's being shared at and it's accessible right there. And so again, that might be helpful because you might be running multiple shares in the

out to ngrok and ask it what URL that's being shared at and it's accessible right there. And so again, that might be helpful because you might be running multiple shares in the background and you want to grab the specific one without having to look through all your tabs or you also might be writing something programmatic where you want to say, if it's being shared right now, do X, Y, Z, well now you have access to that right here. So that's it. That's how you use valet share to hook either into ngrok or expose to take your local sites and make them accessible on the public internet.