View random ngrok URL when run in background

If you want to get the first tunnel then jq will be your friend:

curl -s localhost:4040/api/tunnels | jq -r .tunnels[0].public_url

When running more than one instance of ngrok then use the tunnel name /api/tunnels/:name.

Run ./ngrok http & This runs the ngrok tunnel as a background process. Ngrok usually opens a window showing the assigned URL but since we are using the nohup command this is not visible.

Thus, then run curl http://127.0.0.1:4040/api/tunnels too see the URL assigned by ngrok

This little Python (2.7) script will call the ngrok API and print the current URL's:

import json
import os 

os.system("curl  http://localhost:4040/api/tunnels > tunnels.json")

with open('tunnels.json') as data_file:    
    datajson = json.load(data_file)


msg = "ngrok URL's: \n'
for i in datajson['tunnels']:
  msg = msg + i['public_url'] +'\n'

print (msg)

There are a couple of ways.

You can either:

1) Visit localhost:4040/status in your browser to see a bunch of information, or

2) Use curl to hit the API: localhost:4040/api/tunnels