github.com/inconshreveable/ngrok

This is ngrok's official Go SDK for programmatically creating tunnels. While it eliminates the need for the standalone ngrok binary, the production experience has notable pain points. The library lacks sophisticated connection pooling or resource management patterns you'd expect from a networking SDK. Tunnel reconnection logic exists but isn't particularly configurable, and you'll find yourself wrapping calls in your own retry logic for robustness.

Observability is limited—there are basic callback hooks for events, but no structured logging integration or metrics exposition. You're largely on your own for monitoring tunnel health and debugging connection issues in production. Timeout handling is present but defaults aren't always sensible for production workloads, requiring careful tuning. The error types returned are often wrapped generic errors that don't provide enough context for intelligent retry decisions.

The API surface is reasonable for basic use cases, but when you need fine-grained control over behavior under load or want to implement sophisticated failover patterns, you'll hit limitations quickly. Configuration is somewhat rigid, and the lack of semantic versioning (0.0.0 tags) makes dependency management uncomfortable for production systems.

This package provides Go bindings for ngrok, but the developer experience leaves much to be desired. The repository has virtually no documentation beyond a basic README, and finding working examples requires digging through GitHub issues or old code snippets. The API is not intuitive if you're unfamiliar with ngrok's internals, and there's no guide explaining the connection between configuration options and actual tunnel behavior.

Error messages are particularly frustrating - you'll often get generic connection failures without context about what went wrong (authentication issues, config problems, network errors all look similar). Debugging requires enabling verbose logging and cross-referencing with ngrok's main documentation, which doesn't always map cleanly to this Go wrapper. Stack Overflow has minimal coverage, and GitHub issues show sporadic responsiveness.

For simple tunneling use cases, you might get it working after trial and error, but expect to spend significant time understanding the undocumented nuances. The lack of typed configuration structs with inline documentation means you're constantly context-switching to external resources.

This library wraps ngrok's v2 API but feels incomplete for production use. The documentation is essentially non-existent - the README provides one basic example and that's about it. There are no godocs explaining parameters, no examples covering common scenarios like custom domains or webhook inspection, and no guidance on error handling patterns. You'll spend more time reading the ngrok API docs and reverse-engineering the code than actually building.

The error messages are particularly frustrating. When things go wrong, you get generic HTTP errors or nil pointer panics without context about what configuration failed or why. Debugging requires diving into the library source code regularly. The API surface is small, which sounds good until you realize basic operations require manually constructing requests.

Community support is virtually non-existent. GitHub issues get sporadic responses at best, and Stack Overflow has almost no discussion about this specific library. You're largely on your own when problems arise. For most use cases, you'd be better served using ngrok's official Go SDK or even shelling out to the CLI tool with better error output.