Disclaimer: This setup is just a bit crazy, and I wouldn’t recommend it for a production site. Works for me.
I needed to allow some clients to test a web app I’m working on. But I didn’t want to deploy the code to a server for now for different reasons (mainly memory constraints). So the solution was to setup a reverse proxy using apache to my local machine. Check out the code after the break
Here’s the VirtualHost I created:
ServerName proj312.grat.in
ProxyPass / http://home-ip:18000/
ProxyPassReverse / http://home-ip:18000/
The problem is that my home-ip is not fixed. A Dynamic DNS setup is the fix that comes to mind first. But, I thought I would try something else: Reverse SSH Tunnel
I used the recipe and explanations in this article. Mostly, all I needed to do was the following:
ssh -fNR 18000:localhost:8000 myserver
Where the 18000 is the port on the server, and 8000 is the port on the home machine. No harm in using the same port numbers, btw.
I then changed the VirtualHost configuration in apache on the server to read:
ServerName proj312.grat.in
ProxyPass / http://127.0.0.1:18000/
ProxyPassReverse / http://127.0.0.1:18000/
Restart apache on the server and all falls in place perfectly.
2 Comments
This is brilliant, thank you!
I now have a server behind firewall acting as the local test server, but it can be accessed from the outside if needed when working from home or so.
Bro, u’re a lifesaver, been looking for this this thing and here it is