Debug MS Teams application without ngrok?

Question

I am working on MS Teams development. I installed the MS Teams toolkit in VS Code, set up my subscription with Azure and sideloading is active in my tenant.

When I run the app, it tries to install ngrok. This step fails as my organization does not allow running ngrok or other words tunnelling from our company laptop. We can run this on a VM to go around this but VM is not always available. Bot Emulator also use tunnelling which will again be a problem and cannot be used.

I am looking for a resolution for below scenarios:

1. Is there a way to debug MS Teams application without ngrok?
2. If we need a https URL, is it possible to configure a web app to facilitate that?

I tried removing install ngrok step from: /.vscode/tasks.json, but there are subsequent steps it the file dependent on that

Question originally asked here:
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msteams/forum/all/debug-ms-teams-application-without-ngrok/1441d422-edf1-450c-a7d0-0e9c989dbf1f

Answer 1

Microsoft Teams apps contain one or more capabilities and the ways to run or even host them are different. For debugging, use one of the following ways:

1. Purely local: For bots, you can test your experience in the Bot Emulator. For other content, you can run locally in your browser and address content through http://localhost.
2. Locally hosted in Teams: This involves running the app locally in tunneling software and creating a package to upload into Teams. This permits you to easily run and debug your app within the Teams client.
3. Cloud-hosted in Teams: This truly simulates the production level support for a Teams app. It involves uploading your solution to your externally accessible server or cloud provider of choice and creating a package to upload into Teams.

Reference Document-https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/platform/concepts/build-and-test/debug
Video Link-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0M_AREkss7A

Thanks,

Sayali

---

If the response is helpful, please click "Accept Answer" and upvote it. You can share your feedback via Microsoft Teams Developer Feedback link.

Answer 2

We are using option 3, i.e. every time deploying the model to see if the output is correct. But I really hope that MS could think about an alternative to ngrok