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I am new to web development and will gladly take any advice. I am designing a webpage which which utilizes a MySQL database. I am hosting the webpage on a LAMP server; I am using Ubuntu. Right now, I can only open my webpage on my server itself. I to make it so that the webpage is available locally to the computers in my network. My network contains a mix of computers using either Windows 7 or Mac OS X.

Can you please point me in the right direction? My goal is to allow people in my network to type a URL in their web browser to get to my page and access the data in the mySQL database.

Just to clarify, I DO NOT want my webpage to go online. I just want it to be available locally.

Thank you in advance! This project has been a really good learning experience thus far.

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  • Hint: DNS (padding to get around the stupid 15 character minimum)
    – John Gardeniers
    Jul 14, 2011 at 23:02

2 Answers 2

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You'll need to open port 80 on your web server's firewall to allow other computers in your LAN to access your web site. Then, you can type in the IP address of your web server to access your website from another computer in your LAN.

If your computer has a hostname and the computers in your LAN are configured as part of a domain, then you can also type in the hostname to access the web site as well.

As long as the firewall on your router is blocking connections from port 80, then you shouldn't have to worry about people outside your LAN being able to access your website.

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Each computer in your network has an IP address. Your webserver for example is running on the IP address of the computer the webserver is running. In Ubuntu (or other *nix) you can get if you enter ifconfig into the shell. It will display all interfaces. The IP address is something like 192.168.1.xxx or similar. If you enter that IP address into the browser (you need to know the exact number), it will display the default file or directory index of the root folder of your webserver, also called webroot or by path htdocs. Try it, you should see it.

These IP adresses are shared accross the whole (local) network. Any other computer should be able to access that address as well. An exception to this is if the address is blocked by a firewall. Typically this is not the case.

From the internet, the local adresses are normally shielded so you have not published your website yet.

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