The latest articles on DEV Community by Denis (@denisssenkyrmaker). https://dev.to/denisssenkyrmaker https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=90,height=90,fit=cover,gravity=auto,format=auto/https:%2F%2Fdev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Fuser%2Fprofile_image%2F3970302%2F3dcd31c9-cbe2-4bb1-a56b-52423fa33e8a.png https://dev.to/denisssenkyrmaker en Denis Fri, 05 Jun 2026 18:33:40 +0000 https://dev.to/denisssenkyrmaker/how-i-built-a-free-whatsapp-dev-tunnel-no-ngrok-and-a-self-healing-loop-in-nodejs-25f9 https://dev.to/denisssenkyrmaker/how-i-built-a-free-whatsapp-dev-tunnel-no-ngrok-and-a-self-healing-loop-in-nodejs-25f9 <p>Hey everyone,</p> <p>I've been working on a Node.js project called <strong>Pixel Office</strong> (a multi-agent assistant that runs over WhatsApp). While building it, my dev team ran into a few bottlenecks during local testing and deployment, so we built some custom utilities to solve them. </p> <p>Since they turned out to be super useful, we decided to bundle them and open-source the repository today. Here’s a breakdown of the three dev tools we integrated:</p> <h2> 1. Local Webhook Tunnel (No ngrok) </h2> <p>Testing WhatsApp webhooks locally usually requires setting up ngrok, which has become increasingly restrictive on free tiers, or configuring firewall rules. </p> <p>To bypass this, we built a simple Socket.io proxy in our Express backend. When Meta sends a webhook targeting a developer's phone, the server intercepts it and streams the JSON payload over WebSocket directly to a local CLI client.</p> <p>You just run this locally:</p> <div class="highlight js-code-highlight"> <pre class="highlight plaintext"><code> bash node bin/tunnel-cli.js --port 3000 --key YOUR_API_KEY </code></pre> </div> node javascript webdev ai