How can I publicly access 127.0.0.1 through my network IP address?

Question

I have a lot of servers running under my localhost (127.0.0.1), and I also my vhosts file creating some neat aliases.

But unfortunately I can't access it outside my computer, like for testing on other devices under my network.

Is there any way to redirect the call to my IP like 192.168.1.4 to my localhost?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

You need something that will forward incoming traffic to the machine running all the servers on localhost. You can:

• use a proxy server
• if any of the servers are web servers, use the "reverse proxying" features of Apache or similar web servers
• use software that creates a tunnel - OpenVPN, or various other small programs that basically do nothing but forward traffic
• if this is a linux system and you are looking for an extremely quick and dirty solution to this problem (but it isn't robust), look into rinetd
• create IP tables rules that forward certain ports from externally accessible IPs to 127.0.0.1 and back.