Trying smee

I recently learned about smee, which is a tool to forward webhooks (or any other kind of HTTP Post request) to a locally running service. This can come in particularly handy while developing a service locally, which isn’t exposed on your machine.

The idea is simple:

1. You create a channel on smee.io. This gives you a public endpoint that can receive HTTP POST requests.
2. Smee.io emits incoming requests as Server-Sent Events (SSE).
3. A local smee client subscribes to these events and forwards them to your local service.

A simple walk through using a http-bin as locally running service which is not exposed to the internet:

1. Install smee-client on your local machine

$ npm install -g smee-client

2. Run http-bin (or any other service)

$ docker run -p 3000:80 kennethreitz/httpbin

3. Run smee-client

$ smee \                                  # smee client
    -t http://localhost:3000/post         # locally running service
Forwarding https://smee.io/svEz8ll4Q0B8w36z to http://localhost:3000/post
Connected to https://smee.io/svEz8ll4Q0B8w36z

$ smee \                                  # smee client
    -u https://smee.io/rCUe9fx5k03oryf7 \ # enter smee URL
    -t http://localhost:3000/post         # locally running service
Forwarding https://smee.io/rCUe9fx5k03oryf7 to http://localhost:3000/post
Connected to https://smee.io/rCUe9fx5k03oryf7

If you now send your payload to the smee endpoint, it will be forwarded to you locally running service:

curl -XPOST 'https://smee.io/rCUe9fx5k03oryf7' \
      -d '{"hello":"world"}'

Your smee client should confirm that with a 200 (or any other HTTP code your service yields).

Forwarding https://smee.io/rCUe9fx5k03oryf7 to http://localhost:3000/post
Connected to https://smee.io/rCUe9fx5k03oryf7
POST http://localhost:3000/post - 200

Definitely a good tool to have as part of your tool box.