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Deploy previews and CI test environments are ephemeral by nature—they spin up for a branch, get tested, and disappear. But accessing them securely and reliably can be tricky: you need a public URL for external testing tools or manual review, but you don’t want zombie previews leaking your roadmap to the public internet. ngrok makes ephemeral workloads easier by letting you:
  • Expose staging or preview builds on-demand with secure, authenticated URLs.
  • Use dynamic endpoint URLs based on branch names, PR numbers, or commit SHAs.
  • Apply Traffic Policy to add authentication, logging, and access control to every preview.
  • Clean up automatically when CI jobs finish.

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What you’ll need

  • A CI/CD platform like GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or Jenkins
  • A pay-as-you-go account for custom domains

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1. Reserve a wildcard domain

Navigate to the Domains section of the ngrok dashboard and click New + to reserve a custom wildcard domain like