Apache web server and accessing the website outside local machine

apache-2.2localhostnetworkingwebsite

So I installed Apache web server/MySQL/myPhpAdmin on my windows machine. It's on my desktop. Everything works where if I go to http://localhost, localhost/phpinfo.php and localhost/phpmyadmin.index.php they all show up on my machine.

Now I want other users to be able to access my website, which is http://localhost/page1.php
I already did port forwarding on the machine where the server is hosted and forwarded port 80 on the ip address of the local machine since I have a router.

But people can't access this website from elsewhere or even on other computers within my home network. Do I have to actually get a domain from a site like godaddy or google?
Or can I just have people connect to my local machine (which has the apache web server), and host my own website on it.

I am really confused on how to actually proceed after I installed my web server and created a page in my apache root directory. Can anyone guide me on how to set this up since I don't have any real experience in this area.

Thanks!

Best Answer

Check the Listen directive in your config file for apache httpd.

Also verify what addresses the server is LISTENing on. netstat -na is useful for that. It needs to listen on 0.0.0.0 (or *) or the address of your machine. Not 127.0.0.1.

Related Solutions

Web-server – How to make Apache Web Server listen on two different ports

A standard Debian install of apache will have the following fragment of configuration:

Listen 80

<IfModule mod_ssl.c>
    # SSL name based virtual hosts are not yet supported, therefore no
    # NameVirtualHost statement here
    Listen 443
</IfModule>

This is telling apache to listen on port 80 and to listen to port 443 if mod_ssl is configured. In your case you'd want:

Listen 80
Listen 8080

You need to make sure you run a restart, not a reload operation on apache for it to pay any attention to new Listen directives. The safest thing to do is to stop apache, make sure it is dead and start it again.

If this configuration does not work, check the log files for any error messages. You could use "netstat -lep --tcp" to see if there is anything listening on port 8080. Finally, if everything else doesn't work, try running apache under strace to see if it's trying to bind to that port and failing, but not logging the problem.

Windows – Can’t connect to local web server

Are you sure the web server are running? Type the following commands in a command prompt:

netstat -an | find "80"
netstat -an | find "23456"

If the web servers are running, you should have a similar output:

C:\Documents and Settings\Benoit>netstat -an | find "80"
  TCP    0.0.0.0:80             0.0.0.0:0              LISTENING

By the way, if Visual Studio web server is running on port 23456, you must use the following URIs:

According to your output, it really seems a firewall is running on your computer. Have you tried to connect from another computer on your network?

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