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Consider ngrok alternatives #146
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Reported here and by a few collaborators.
It seems that some time after Aug 10 and before Aug 18, ngrok changed its policy and no longer allows http tunnels to connect ws tunnels on the free account. I have not verified myself, but I understand that logging in to a user account on ngrok resolves the issue. (there is still a limit of 2 connections; passing bind_tls=False to pyngrok helps; otherwise pyngrok grabs http and https for the first request, consuming the full quota immediately).
This is bad news. Effectively all of the notebooks that I've released to date will no longer run meshcat on colab.
Possible resolutions:
- Find a different way to open a port directly to an http server running on the cloud-provisioned machine. Possibly related to Port from colab to deepnote #144 .
- Host my own ngrok alternative. This looks promising: https://github.com/rightscale/wstunnel
- Find a way to keep using ngrok; hopefully without requiring users to log in.
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RussTedrake commentedon Aug 22, 2021
One work-around is to make an account on ngrok and authenticate at the top of the notebook:
You will still be limited to running only a single ngrok process on the free tier. You can use
to clean it up if you need it.
RussTedrake commentedon Aug 23, 2021
Update: ngrok support got back to me, and said that the change to the free account performance was inadvertent. It's been fixed now.
I will still pursue the options above, as all of them will be better than what we currently use.
[-]Meshcat does not visualize models on colab. [ngrok no longer provides ws:// on free accounts][/-][+]Consider ngrok alternatives[/+]RussTedrake commentedon Aug 31, 2021
@danzvara has enabled http/ws tunneling on deepnote for us! It will only tunnel one port (8080). If we need more then we should still fall back to ngrok.
RussTedrake commentedon Jul 31, 2022
We've gone with NginX instead RobotLocomotion/drake#16805