Web developers: you can develop as you would on a real website, without having to buy or manage a server. If you're new to web development, we think Emporter is one of the easiest servers to use.
Mobile app developers: you can use Emporter to help code your next app. Emporter serves secure URLs by default (which is a requirement on iOS), and you can use localhost if you want. Emporter URLs are accessible anywhere: test your app in the real world!
Mobile web developers: you can use Emporter access your work on a real device and make better design decisions. Load times, for instance, are easily estimated when using real mobile data.
Web entrepreneurs: you can easily test out new ideas in a controled environment by creating and sharing URLs with Emporter.
Anyone can access URLs served by Emporter, whether they're your clients, teammates, friends, or service providers (webhooks).
Yes! If you can browse the web behind your firewall, you should have no problems.
If you're having technical problems, it might be best to contact support from within the app so you can (optionally) include logs, which may be helpful.
Otherwise, you can contact @EmporterApp on Twitter or support@emporter.app.
Emporter works by using our server(s) as a proxy to a folder or port on your Mac.
Each URL served forwards its requests to Emporter. When Emporter receives the request, it responds by either using the built-in web server, or by proxying it to an existing server on your Mac.
Because Emporter establishes the connection with our server, all network activity from your Mac is outbound. This is a huge win because it should "just work" behind any firewall.
WordPress must be configured to serve relative URLs in order to use it with Emporter.
The easiest way of doing this is by installing the relative-url plugin.
You sure can! You can do this by modifying the Host header when sharing a port on your Mac.
Newer versions of Emporter also allow you to configure local servers with SSL, which is particularly handy if you're using MAMP.
Our services run throughout multiple regions within Europe and North America with redundancy. These services work in clusters which dynamically spawn new instances based on demand.
It's not recommended to use Emporter for anything other than development, but the service is very reliable.
Emporter runs in a sandbox on your Mac. It only has access to directories that you choose.
The component which exposes a URL to your Mac runs in separate process with extremely limited permissions. All communication with our server, including the live transfer of data from your Mac, occurs over SSL within this process.
Your project's data is never stored on our servers.
We keep receipts from the Mac App Store. That's pretty much it. URL names are stored in memory and are removed when they're no longer in use.
You, and anyone you share it with.
If you don't want anyone to stumble upon your URL accidentally, you can password protect it within Emporter. This works great for top-secret projects.
It's worth noting that there is not a public directory of URLs.