How do I connect to this localhost from another computer on the same network

Question

I m currently working on a project and I would like to test it out on two laptops at home where one laptop connects to the localhost on the other  I am using XAMPP  How do I do this

User · Answer

On Mac OS X    In terminal  run ifconfig   grep 192  to get the internal IP of your machine on it s current network   It may be something like 192 168 1 140 Start a server   For example  node server js may start a server on some port  On your phone  visit 192 168 1 140 3000 or whatever port your server is running on

User · Answer

This tool saved me a lot  since I have no Admin permission on my machine and already had nodejs installed  For some reason the configuration on my network does not give me access to other machines just pointing the IP on the browser     Using a local dev vhost   browser-sync start --proxy    Using a local dev vhost with PORT   browser-sync start --proxy local dev 8001    Using a localhost address   browser-sync start --proxy localhost 8001    Using a localhost address in a sub-dir   browser-sync start --proxy localhost 8080 site1   http   www browsersync io docs command-line

User · Answer

Provided both machines are in the same workgroup  open cmd exe on the machine you want to connect to  type ipconfig and note the IP at the IPv4 Address line   Then  on the machine you want to connect with  use http      the IP of the target machine   That should do it

User · Answer

This is a side note if one still can t access localhost from another devices after following through the step above  This might be due to the apache ports conf has been configured to serve locally  127 0 0 1  and not to outside   check the following   for ubuntu apache2       cat  etc apache2 ports conf   if the following is set     NameVirtualHost   80   Listen 127 0 0 1 80     then change it back to default value    NameVirtualHost   80   Listen 80

User · Answer

it may be that your firewalls are preventing you from accessing the localhost s webserver  Put the IP addresses of both of your computers  internet security antivirus network security as safe IP addresses if required  How to find the IP address of your windows PC  Start    Run  type in  cmd   Enter   This opens the black box command prompt  type in  ipconfig  Enter  Let s say your Apache or IIS webserver is installed on your PC   192 168 0 3 and you want to access your webserver with your laptop   laptop s IP is 192 168 0 5  On your PC you type in  http   localhost  inside your Firefox or Internet Eplorer browser to access your data on your webserver  On your laptop you type in http   192 168 0 3  to access your webserver on your PC    For all these things to work you need have installed a webserver correctly  e g  IIS  Apache  XAMP  WAMP etc    If it does not work  try to ping your PC from your laptop  Open up command propmt on your laptop  Start   cmd  Enter  ping 192 168 1 3   Enter  If the pinging fails  then firewalls are blocking your connection or your network cabling is faulty  Restart your modem or network switch and your machines  Close programs such as chat programs that are using your ports  You can also try a diffrent port number  http 192 168 0 3 80  or http 192 168 0 3 81 or any random number at the end

User · Answer

That s definitely possible  We ll take a general case with Apache here    Let s say you re a big Symfony2 fan and you would like to access your symfony website at http   symfony local  from 4 different computers  the main one hosting your website  as well as a Mac  a Windows and a Linux distro connected  wireless or not  to the main computer   General Sketch       1  Set up a virtual host    You first need to set up a virtual host in your apache httpd-vhosts conf file  On XAMP  you can find this file here  C  xampp apache conf extra httpd-vhosts conf  On MAMP  you can find this file here  Applications MAMP conf apache extra httpd-vhosts conf  This step prepares the Web server on your computer for handling symfony local requests  You need to provide the name of the Virtual Host as well as the root main folder of your website  To do this  add the following line at the end of that file  You need to change the DocumentRoot to wherever your main folder is  Here I have taken  Applications MAMP htdocs Symfony  as the root of my website    lt VirtualHost   80 gt      DocumentRoot   Applications MAMP htdocs Symfony       ServerName symfony local  lt  VirtualHost gt    2  Configure your hosts file    For the client  your browser in that case  to understand what symfony local really means  you need to edit the hosts file on your computer  Everytime you type an URL in your browser  your computer tries to understand what it means  symfony local doesn t mean anything for a computer  So it will try to resolve the name symfony local to an IP address  It will do this by first looking into the hosts file on your computer to see if he can match an IP address to what you typed in the address bar  If it can t  then it will ask DNS servers  The trick here is to append the following to your hosts file     On MAC  this file is in  private etc hosts   On LINUX  this file is in   etc hosts   On WINDOWS  this file is in  Windows system32 private etc hosts  On WINDOWS 7  this file is in  Windows system32 drivers etc hosts  On WINDOWS 10  this file is in  Windows system32 drivers etc hosts    Hosts file       Host Database   localhost is used to configure the loopback interface         127 0 0 1           symfony local   From now on  everytime you type symfony local on this computer  your computer will use the loopback interface to connect to symfony local  It will understand that you want to work on localhost  127 0 0 1    3  Access symfony local from an other computer    We finally arrive to your main question which is      How can I now access my website through an other computer    Well this is now easy  We just need to tell the other computers how they could find symfony local  How do we do this    3a  Get the IP address of the computer hosting the website    We first need to know the IP address on the computer that hosts the website  the one we ve been working on since the very beginning   In the terminal  on MAC and LINUX type ifconfig  grep inet  on WINDOWS type ipconfig  Let s assume the IP address of this computer is 192 168 1 5   3b  Edit the hosts file on the computer you are trying to access the website from     Again  on MAC  this file is in  private etc hosts  on LINUX  in   etc hosts  and on WINDOWS  in  Windows system32 private etc hosts  if you re using WINDOWS 7  this file is in  Windows system32 drivers etc hosts    The trick is now to use the IP address of the computer we are trying to access talk to        Host Database   localhost is used to configure the loopback interface         192 168 1 5         symfony local   4 Finally enjoy the results in your browser  You can now go into your browser and type http   symfony local to beautifully see your website on different computers  Note that you can apply the same strategy if you are a OSX user  to test your website on Internet Explorer via Virtual Box  if you don t want to use a Windows computer   This is beautifully explained in Crafting Your Windows   IE Test Environment on OSX     You can also access your localhost from mobile devices  You might wonder how to access your localhost website from a mobile device  In some cases  you won t be able to modify the hosts file  iPhone  iPad     on your device  jailbreaking excluded    Well  the solution then is to install a proxy server on the machine hosting the website and connect to that proxy from your iphone  It s actually very well explained in the following posts and is not that long to set up   On a Mac  I would recommend  Testing a Mac OS X web site using a local hostname on a mobile device  Using SquidMan as a proxy  It s a 100  free solution  Some people can also use Charles as a proxy server but it s 50    On Linux  you can adapt the Mac OS way above by using Squid as a proxy server   On Windows  you can do that using Fiddler  The solution is described in the following post  Monitoring iPhone traffic with Fiddler    Edit 23 11 2017  Hey I don t want to modify my Hosts file      Dre  Any possible way to access the website from another computer by not   editing the host file manually  let s say I have 100 computers wanted   to access the website   This is an interesting question  and as it is related to the OP question  let me help   You would have to do a change on your network so that every machine knows where your website is hosted  Most everyday routers don t do that so you would have to run your own DNS Server on your network   Let s pretend you have a router  192 168 1 1   This router has a DHCP server and allocates IP addresses to 100 machines on the network   Now  let s say you have  same as above  on the same network  a machine at 192 168 1 5 which has your website  We will call that machine pompei     echo  HOSTNAME pompei   Same as before  that machine pompei at 192 168 1 5 runs an HTTP Server which serves your website symfony local   For every machine to know that symfony local is hosted on pompei we will now need a custom DNS Server on the network which knows where symfony local is hosted  Devices on the network will then be able to resolve domain names served by pompei internally   3 simple steps   Step 1  DNS Server  Set-up a DNS Server on your network  Let s have it on pompei for convenience and use something like dnsmasq      Dnsmasq provides Domain Name System  DNS  forwarder         We want pompei to run DNSmasq to handle DNS requests Hey  pompei  where is symfony local and respond Hey  sure think  it is on 192 168 1 5 but don t take my word for it   Go ahead install dnsmasq  dnsmasq configuration file is typically in  etc dnsmasq conf depending on your environment   I personally use no-resolv and google servers server 8 8 8 8 server 8 8 8 4    Note   ALWAYS restart DNSmasq if modifying  etc hosts file as no changes will take effect otherwise   Step 2  Firewall  To work  pompei needs to allow incoming and outgoing   domain  packets  which are going from and to port 53  Of course  These are DNS packets and if pompei does not allow them  there is no way for your DNS server to be reached at all  Go ahead and open that port 53  On linux  you would classically use iptables for this   Sharing what I came up with but you will very likely have to dive into your firewall and understand everything well       Allow outbound DNS port 53    iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 53 -j ACCEPT  iptables -A INPUT -p udp --dport 53 -j ACCEPT   iptables -A OUTPUT -p tcp --dport 53 -j ACCEPT  iptables -A OUTPUT -p udp --dport 53 -j ACCEPT   iptables -A INPUT -p udp --sport 53 -j ACCEPT  iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --sport 53 -j ACCEPT   iptables -A OUTPUT -p tcp --sport 53 -j ACCEPT  iptables -A OUTPUT -p udp --sport 53 -j ACCEPT   Step 3  Router  Tell your router that your dns server is on 192 168 1 5 now  Most of the time  you can just login into your router and change this manually very easily   That s it  When you are on a machine and ask for symfony local  it will ask your DNS Server where symfony local is hosted  and as soon as it has received its answer from the DNS server  will then send the proper HTTP request to pompei on 192 168 1 5   I let you play with this and enjoy the ride  These 2 steps are the main guidelines  so you will have to debug and spend a few hours if this is the first time you do it  Let s say this is a bit more advanced networking  there are primary DNS Server  secondary DNS Servers  etc   Good luck

User · Answer

For testing on both laptops on the same wireless and across the internet you could use a service like http   localhost run  or https   ngrok com

User · Answer

If you are on Windows  use ipconfig to get the local IPv4 address  and then specify that under your Apache configuration file  httpd conf  like   Listen  10 20 30 40 80   Restart your Apache server and test it from other computer on the network

[localhost] How do I connect to this localhost from another computer on the same network?

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