How to: A definitive Xampp guide to allowing people access to your sites on your PC

[sixfootjames]

I've been using Xampp for years now and with bandwidth and speeds improving so much over the years, I now want to give my clients direct access to the development site I am working on so that they can start adding content to the site from the getgo, rather than wait for the content at the end of the project. All part of improving my web development workflow.

I've followed numerous tutorials now and cannot get this working and would appreciate the help. Here is what I have.

• Duoplus 300 router
• Xampp server
• Windows 7 Professional
• No-ip all set up with host name

I have set up the port forwarding in the DuoPlus using the standard settings for an application server (see attached)

I have also tried the custom port forwarding with settings I found on this forum but this didn't work either.
To the best of my knowledge the firewall is open. I delete the rule allowing connections in for Apache and started Apache again, when it asked for Firewall access I allowed internal as well as external connections.

According to http://www.canyouseeme.org/ the connection is refused.

I've also played around with these settings in the httpd-xampp.conf and would like to know what this should be set to. According to Apache Friends forums there shouldn't be much to change at all but many others have had similar problems to the ones I am having.

#
# New XAMPP security concept
#

# Close XAMPP security section here
<LocationMatch "^/(?i?:security))">
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
Allow from ::1 127.0.0.0/8
ErrorDocument 403 /error/HTTP_XAMPP_FORBIDDEN.html.var
</LocationMatch>

# Close XAMPP sites here
<LocationMatch "^/(?i?:xampp|licenses|phpmyadmin|webalizer|server-status|server-info))">
Order deny,allow
Allow from all
Allow from ::1 127.0.0.0/8
ErrorDocument 403 /error/HTTP_XAMPP_FORBIDDEN.html.var
</LocationMatch>

So if someone has a definitive guide on getting this up and running properly, from a South Africans point of view, that would be great please.

Many thanks

 

[InvisibleJim]

Does the custom rule option on your router let you specify the forwarding rule by port number rather than using built in rules? That might be worth looking at.

Just a word of caution with Xampp (apologies if you are aware of this already) - as a development environment it is deliberately configured in a relatively insecure manner out of the box. Making it properly secure for a web facing production environment is quite involved.