Skip to main content

Tinylicious

What is Tinylicious?​

Tinylicious is a local, in-memory Fluid service intended for prototyping and development purpose. The TinyliciousClient is designed to work specifically with the Tinylicious service.

Using Tinylicious locally​

You can run Tinylicious locally by executing the following command:

npx tinylicious@latest

By default, Tinylicious runs on port 7070. You can change port by setting the PORT environment variable when running Tinylicious. Setting environment variables will vary based on the shell you are using. For example, the Windows PowerShell commands below will run Tinylicious on port 6502.

$env:PORT=6502
npx tinylicious@latest

Now Tinylicious is listening on port 6502.

How to deploy using Tinylicious​

You can use TinyliciousClient to create and load Fluid containers with Tinylicious. Check out the DiceRoller tutorial for an example setting up the Tinylicious client and server.

  1. Run Tinylicious by running the following command:

    npx tinylicious@latest

  2. Run TinyliciousClient by running the following command:

    npm run start:client

Testing with Tinylicious and multiple clients​

When testing, it can be useful to make Tinylicious available outside localhost. You can use a service like ngrok to expose the Tinylicious port on your local machine to the internet. ngrok gives you a random hostname for each tunnel you create and routes requests to your locally-running Tinylicious service.

To use Tinylicious with ngrok, use the following steps. If you do not have an ngrok account, you can sign up at https://ngrok.com/.

  1. Sign in to the ngrok dashboard and click "Your Authtoken". You will need this token to authenticate with ngrok.

  2. Download ngrok and unzip the file.

  3. Connect to your account by running the following command.

    ngrok authtoken <YOUR NGROK AUTHTOKEN>

    Running this command will add your authtoken to the default ngrok.yml configuration file.

  4. Run Tinylicious service locally

    npx tinylicious@latest

  5. Start ngrok and point it to the Tinylicious port. By default, Tinylicious is running on port 7070, so the PORT_NUMBER in the below command should be 7070. If you are running against a non-default port, set PORT_NUMBER accordingly.

    ngrok http PORT_NUMBER

After completing the final step, you will see the Forwarding URL in your terminal, which can be used to access Tinylicious.

Note that the ngrok URL supports both HTTP and HTTPS tunneling through to your local server.

If your ngrok account includes the capability to set custom domains or subdomains, you can use the following command to use a custom domain instead of a randomly-generated one.

ngrok http -hostname CUSTOM_DOMAIN_NAME PORT_NUMBER