Introduction
One of the virtualization service that offered by many cloud providers is Virtual Machine. (VM). This article will provide you steps on how to How To Create Your Free VM. Yes, it is for free version of Virtual Machines with limited specifications offered by ngrok, a Software Company based in San Franciso, Californa, United States of America.
What Is Ngrok?
Ngrok is a Software Company that enables developers to expose a local development server to the Internet with minimal effort. According from sendbird.com, Ngrok is a cross-platform application that creates secure tunnels (paths) to localhost machine. It enables developers to expose a local development server to the Internet with minimal effort.
What Is Virtual Machine?
In easy words, Virtual machine is normal machines (computers) in virtual version. They works and functions identically as same as what physical machines can perform. We have published an article regarding this and you still may read short sumamry about what is Virtual Machine via What Is Virtual Machine? Is It Possible To Use For Free?
Register Github Account
The first and foremost to build free Virtual Machine by ngrok, you need to have a Github account. Github is a web-based platform used for version control and collaborative software development. It allows developers to host and manage code repositories, track changes and collaborate with others. As this article focus on creating Virtual Machine, we will not focus on Github and perhaps other article will published to cover about Github and their features and so on.
Upon Github account created, click on Create a New Repository (Choose Private). Name you own repo with the most easiest to remember.
After creating Repository, click on Setting at the tab menu as per below screenshot fot better understanding.
Then click on Secret and Variables>Actions>New Repository secret
After you clicked on Actions, it will bring you to this page as per below screenshot. Both Name and Secret you will need to ontain them in ngrok account. Now let us create ngrok account for free.
Register Ngrok Account
Open new tab, and access for Ngrok website. Click on Sign Up and fill the required informations and verify your email address. Do this until account successfully created.
Secret and Variables
Once your ngrok account created, go to Getting Started>Your Authtoken. Copy this Authtoken . This token will need to paste onto your GitHub in Secret and Variables setting as per screnshot below. Move to Github page, and paste the Authtoken.
Click on Add secret and you are one more step to finish. Remain in the same tab, click on Action>Set Up a Workflow Yourself as per below screenshot.
Set up Workflow
Once you click on set up a workflow yourself you will bring to below page to create a main.yml file. Here, you will need to copy and paste the code I provided here. (Download main.yml file)
Create main.yml file
Open the main.yml file or else you may open via Notepad and copy the all script and paste them on to the box to create main.yml file as per above screenshot. Then click on Commit Changes. Now your workflow already created. This is the time now to run the workflow!
Run Workflow
Click on Actions>CI. Click Run workflow scroll down and choose Run Workflow as below screeenshot.
Once you run the workflow, you will see as below screenshot.
Connect To New Virtual Machine
If you see as above screenshot, make sure there is no error message after you run the workflow. Next is to move back to ngrok tab and search for Endpoints.
You will notice that there is the tcp details mentioned as per above screenshot. Copy that link and now open RDP on your windows OS machine.
Paste the server and removed tcp://. Click on Connect and you will need to enter username and password. Enter below details:
- username: runneradmin
- Password: P@ssw0rd!
These username and password is the one mentioned in the main.yml scrypt that we created. However this username and password you should change it by yourself in main.yml file that we provided previously.
Here you go, your free version of Virtual Machine now ready to use for two hours. For more info about the free version of Ngrok services you may refer here