Site development using pagekite

Wednesday April 9, 2014, Will Kahn-Greene | share this (mastodon)

Note: This is an old post in a blog with a lot of posts over a long span of time. The world has changed, technologies have changed, and I've changed. It's likely this is out of date, the code doesn't work, the ideas haven't aged well, or the ideas were terrible to begin with. Let me know if you think this is something that needs updating.

Problem

I have this basic problem where I do a lot of web-site work and I need to show people what I've done so far so they can review it and help me make it better or make it suit their needs better. Screenshots aren't very helpful because the site is interactive. Further, the site needs to get tested on multiple devices/platforms/browsers. Also, I need to make sure that the site is only accessed via https.

What I've been doing up to now is failing miserably: I'd push work to our staging server for people to test out, but that sucks as an answer and affects my co-workers and makes a mess of our staging server. Plus iterating on things is difficult.

So, requirements:

endpoint must be https-only
must be easy to set up and take down
must be easy to access so people can easily test things on my local machine

Solution

I looked around and this would be pretty easy to do if I didn't have the https-only requirement. That makes things difficult without a lot of work.

Then I found pagekite. They make it really easy.

Here's how you set it up:

Download and install the pagekite software: http://pagekite.net/downloads/
Run your website. In my case, I'm working on Django sites, so I launch like this:
```
$ ./manage.py runserver
```
That runs the Django project I'm working on on localhost:8000.
Run pagekite:
```
$ pagekite.py 8000 YOUR_NAME.pagekite.me:443
```
That creates a tunnel from your machine to the pagekite.me server. When someone accesses https://YOUR_NAME.pagekite.me/, the request goes through the tunnel to your pagekite backend and that performs the request over http to your local webserver (in my case, the Django project) bound to localhost:8000.

Access is https-only. If anyone tries to access http://YOUR_NAME.pagekite.me/, then they get a connection error.

The https-only requirement is satisfied by restricting the kite to only listening to port 443--the https port. That's pretty key.

This lets me run my Django project locally on http without dealing with self-signed certificates, but still require https access so data isn't floating around in clear text.

The one problem with this is that my local server thinks it's running http and so redirects that include the protocol go to http rather than https.

If you don't already have an account, I'm pretty sure step 3 will walk you through setting one up. Free accounts are limited in what they can do.

Also, they hang out on #pagekite on Freenode. I had a problem, asked a question and got a super helpful reply. The code is Open Source, so it's possible to look through it and debug it.

I'll be using this going forward.

Why write this?

This is a common use case for web developers. I figured I'd write this up because the https-only part is pretty key and it was the part that I had to ask for help with.

Want to comment? Send an email to willkg at bluesock dot org. Include the url for the blog entry in your comment so I have some context as to what you're talking about.