Hosting Your Web App Directly from Your System.

It’s often a requirement or for quick demonstration of your product without deploying it to the cloud & hosting it from your system. Be it for testing purpose or deployment. Here we will go through steps on how to achieve our goal.

Let’s get started

Step 1:

Goto https://www.noip.com a sign up for an account.

Here is post registration official guide.

Step 2:

Download the No-IP client from here based on your system available for Windows, Linux, MacOS. When downloaded open the client and sign in with your account. Select the host name and we are done with this step.

Select a hostname

Step 3:

We need to know our LAN IP address.

For that open terminal and type ifconfig -a or you check in your network preferences.

Get your LAN IP address

Now that we know the LAN IP address is 192.168.10.1 Let’s move to next step.

Step 4:

Now we need to do port forwarding. The whole process is defined in the official guide and here is the video guide.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLunOJZqmc0

Here i will setup my router for port forwarding.

1. Open your router page in browser, for me its 192.168.10.1
2. Goto Advanced > NAT > Virtual Servers & click on add button.

Advanced > NAT > Virtual Servers

3. Now select user interface used for internet connection. Select custom service and give it a name. Configure the rest as shown here.

Set Port Forwarding

Alternatively, you can also use the DMZ host which will open all ports for the specified IP address. Here is how we do it.

DMZ Host

Step 5:

Let’s start a python server and test with the No-IP.

Create a folder anywhere with any name.
Create index.html file in this folder & place any html content you like.

Start a terminal in same folder and execute the following command.

python3 -m http.server

Now open the No-IP hostname you selected after installing the client.

Here is the result.

Result