Use the LAN based IP address to access local Apache on laptop when working outside the network

apache-2.2internal-dnsipvirtualhost

<VirtualHost *:80>
  DocumentRoot "D:/Projects"
  ServerName 192.168.11.74
</VirtualHost>

Why doesn't this work ? How to access websites on the local box (Windows, Apache, MySql, PHP) which are based on IP address assigned by company's internal network which is not accessible to outside. When the laptop gets connected to internal network, all websites works, but when outside of the company network, these IP based url doesn't work even if all the code-base, development environment resides in the local Apache server on the laptop itself.

Is there a way to point 192.168.XX.XXX to 127.0.0.1

Best Answer

Option 1

Set ServerName to localhost like this:

ServerName localhost

Then access the server via

http://localhost

It will not matter what IP you have.

Option 2

First you setup VirtualHost like this:

<VirtualHost *:80>
  DocumentRoot "D:/Projects"
  ServerName projecthost
</VirtualHost>

Then on windows you can always set an IP to which "projecthost" will point to. Edit C:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts file and add:

projecthost 127.0.0.1

projecthost 192.168.11.74

Then access the server via

http://projecthost

Related Solutions

How to configure Apache to use HTTPS for external access but HTTP for internal access

I'm going to make the assumption that you do accept HTTP connections for the public, but you do a standard HTTP redirect to force them to HTTPS.

If this is the case, then you can alter your HTTP directives to not redirect if you are part of the internal network.

To do this, you want to use Apache's mod_rewrite and filter on REMOTE_ADDR. Essentially, you want to redirect everything that does not match your network.

The other option, and probably the safer one, is to just have your internal users use a different service address than the public one. Have them connect to myservice.mydomain.local instead of myservice.mydomain.com.

Apache2 multiple hostnames redirected to one

To be fairly honest with you, the best approch i can see for this would be if you setup your main domain normally like this:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName www.example.com
    DocumentRoot /www/domain 
</virtualhost>

Then you create a new virtualhost that will hold all domains you want to redirect like this:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName example.com
    ServerAlias foo.example.com bar.example.com others.example.com
    DocumentRoot /www/redirect_folder 
</virtualhost>

Inside that folder make a simple index.php page that summons the 301 so any domains hold in there will be redirect to your main domain with the 301 code.

<?
Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
Header( "Location: http://www.example.com" );
?>

Why do you think it is better this way ?

This way you won't have to keep updating a bunch of places everytime you have a new domain to hold and redirct to your main domain and it won't be serving your users with the current name but will actually redirect them to your main domain in question.

If you are the server owner you can make it even better, you can put the 2nd virtualhost as the first virtualhost in your httpd.conf of vhost.conf file and whenever you hit the IP of your server it will lead you to the redirection page which will lead your users to the main domain in this case instead of having to set a bunch of ServerAlias you can just create the DNS A record for that given subdomain or domain leading to your IP and the server will take care of the rest.

In this last case all you would need for your virtual host would be:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName example.com
    DocumentRoot /www/redirect_folder 
</virtualhost>

as you dont need the ServerAlias since every and each request that hits your server IP will go to your first vhost.

In addition if you wanted to do this using .htaccess, it would be something like this i belive:

RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^foo.example.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [r=301,nc]