Is there a way to have Pipedream talk to an application running on my local machine?

This topic was automatically generated from Slack. You can find the original thread here.

Andrew Huang : Hello. I am new to Pipedream and am looking for some help. I am currently trying to use the Cron functionality in my application to automate updating my DB (MongoDB) periodically. The application relies on retrieving data from an external API and updates its DB based on the external API’s responses. The flow I am planning on implementing goes as follows… (1) GET users from the database, (2) GET Related data from external API based on a user’s data field, (3) send retrieved data from external API back to the server through PUT request to update users in the DB. Just wanted to get some validation that this is possible. In addition, I am currently running the application on localhost and am running into the following error when trying to make a GET request to retrieve my users. Wondering if anyone has run into a similar issue?

Dylan Sather (Pipedream) : Hi Andrew, what you’re hoping to do should be possible. You’re running into this error now because Pipedream needs to talk to a host on the public internet. localhost works when you want a service on your machine to talk to another service on your machine, but for Pipedream to talk to it, it needs an “internet-addressable” host name.

Services like ngrok solve this - you can get a public hostname that points to your local service: https://ngrok.com/

Dylan Sather (Pipedream) : Then you can plug in the ngrok-provided hostname to your Pipedream HTTP request and give that a try

Andrew Huang : Thank you!