How to configure Visual Studio 2017 to expose a non-encrypted port in a ASP.Net MVC https site

Question

I'm trying to test webhooks from Stripe.com on my locahost (dev machine) using Visual Studio 2017. My site uses https. In order to test webhooks, you need a url, so on my local machine I have to install and use ngrok. Ngrok gives me a url to provide to Stripe so stripe knows where to send the post request. The problem is ngrok doesn't work with https!

I've been looking for a solution for 2 days and I've emailed ngrok to ask, they replied with

you should be able to configure VS to expose a non-encrypted port but i'm not super familiar with it in a way that I can tell you how to go about doing it. maybe the ngrok VS extension will help? https://ngrok.com/docs#visual-studio

I've already tried running the extension. No luck! All it does is open up the ngrok.exe and runs it.

So I'm trying to see if it's possible to open/expose a non-encrypted port? I assume this means a action method or controller using http and NOT https?

Or does it mean something else? Is this possible in ASP.NET MVC???

Answer 1

I was able to get my ASP.NET Core MVC project to accept test Stripe webhooks calls this morning using ngrok in VS 2017 running on IIS Express.

I had to do two things:

1. Turn off app.UseHttpsRedirection() when testing. I modified my Startup.Configure(..) to only use HTTP redirection when not in development like this:

   public void Configure(IApplicationBuilder app, IHostingEnvironment env)
   {
       if (env.IsDevelopment())
       {               
           // <snip>
       }
       else
       {
           // <snip>
           app.UseHttpsRedirection(); // <- Moved from outside to inside else block to allow ngrok tunneling for testing Stripe webhooks
       }
   
       // <snip>
       app.UseMvc();
   }
   

2. Start ngrok tunneling using the non-HTTPS URL for the website. In my case, my project is configured to use the following ports:

     <binding protocol="http" bindingInformation="*:64768:localhost" />
     <binding protocol="https" bindingInformation="*:44358:localhost" />
   

   So my ngrok command is this:

   ngrok http 64768 -host-header="localhost:64768"
   

Hope this helps someone - I too struggled for awhile to get this to work.

Answer 2

See my answer here: How To Disable Https in Visual Studio 2017 Web Proj ASP.NET Core 2.0

Note: If I'm wrong about there being a default unsecured URL, the question above has a solution for disabling the secured URL. I didn't try it because there was already an unsecured URL defined in my existing project (as I suspect there is with yours as well)

• Also, this answer seems good (Ngrok errors '502 bad gateway'), but again I didn't need to try it.

Just use the established unsecured URL instead of the secured one.