Actions on Google: ngrok, running fulfillment locally

Question

I can deploy to Firebase using "firebase deploy --only functions". However, I'd like to run ngrok in my local computer, as suggested here . How can I do that?

I understand that ngrok will expose a certain URL with a port on the Internet and that it starts locally with a port as parameter. Do I also need to run NodeJS on the same port locally? The sample NodeJS script for using the Inline Editor doesn't declare a NodeJS port. Instead, it has this:

exports.dialogflowFirebaseFulfillment = functions.https.onRequest( ... 

Answer 1

Three step process:

1. Run firebase serve --only functions. The serve command simulates the deployment environment on your own machine. You need to be running node.js (6.11.5 preferred, since that is what runs on Firebase Cloud Functions), but you don't need to make any changes to your code.

2. It will report something like

   functions: webhook: http://localhost:5000/project-name/us-central1/function-name

   Note the port number (after the "localhost" part) and use that as a parameter for ngrok with a command like ngrok http 5000. (Don't worry about the "http" part - it will make an https port available.)

3. The ngrok console will start and will include a line like

   Forwarding https://zz99z999.ngrok.io -> localhost:5000

   You'll need to combine the URL base from here and the path that firebase has told you for your webhook fulfillment url. In our example, this would be https://zz99z999.ngrok.io/project-name/us-central1/function-name.