how to bind IP address to a domain name? - ruby-on-rails

we currently have a completed rails app and are looking to deploy on a local secured network. To have all devices on secured network access the site I bound my IP address with
bundle exec rails server --binding= <ip-address>
It works perfectly however we don't want to release the IP address of the computer running the app so how can I set an ip dress t o a host name? Thanks

Related

DNS and IP address difference( AWS- Load balancer concepts)

I need to know the difference between DNS name and IP address.
Context --> Client applications interact with ALB(application load balancers) which in turn interact with EC2 instance.
Now it is told that we get a fixed hostname with "ALB", so does this mean we get a fixed IP which is all our applications can connect to ALB only via one IP address ?
Regards,
Somen Swain

Is there a way to get the iOS simulator to access a FQDN redirecting to my localhost?

I am running a local web server with SSL enabled that my app needs to log into. I have a domain name whose A-record is set to 127.0.0.1, which allows for local development using loopback with an nginx server with different subdomain configurations for services on the app I have hosted locally. The problem is that, in the iOS simulator, the domain resolves to the device's localhost and not my machine. I can't use the IP address of my machine because I need the domain for nginx to redirect to the proper vhost (also SSL and OAUTH would get mad).
Is there any way to use a custom DNS server for lookup in the simulator? Either that, or can I edit the hosts file to set the domain to my device's LAN IP instead of localhost? Any other ideas?

Is it possible to set a localhost IP for iPhone?

The use case is that we are testing a site that runs on a local machine.
I know how to access the site (How do you access a website running on localhost from iPhone browser), but there are redirects to "localhost".
Is there any way to set localhost to an IP address on iPhone?
localhost is a loopback address. So you cannot access a website hosted on iPhone or any device remotely using 127.0.0.1. You would just access the site using the whatever IP address was assigned by DHCP.
Yes, you can set the IP Address of the Wi-Fi connection under Settings --> WiFi.
Well, the IP address for localhost is 127.0.0.1 but you can't access your phone's localhost because it's not an Apache server? You can only access your app's directory eg. Documents.
And Apple doesn't allow you to access your iPhone's root folder, if you wanted to access this.
If you want to view websites from another computer's localhost you need to use that machine's internal IP address (eg. 192.168.0.1) if you are on the same WiFi/LAN network.

How do you host a Ruby on Rails application on a local network, so multiple people can access it?

I'm brand new to RoR and have pretty much 0 experience with it. I have been handed down somebody else's project and I need to find a way to host the application, so people can just access it locally. The application is a spider script/walker script/web scraper whatever you call it. Basically it connects to a website, logs in, retrieves certain data each day and maps it with the previous data. While on the local machine, you use it, go to localhost:3000, and you get the webpage the previous person designed. I was just wondering how I could get that page to be public for the people on our local network, so they could connect to some arbitrary IP and see the same page (it updates daily)?
What I tried doing is making the folder containing the application public to the network, but in order to use it, I would have to make everybody on the network allowed to write to it and each person would have to install RoR to use it. I want to avoid that since it doesn't seem logical, nor is it what I'm trying to do.
Looking at the code, I can reverse engineer and understand what it does, but when it comes to hosting web apps locally or something of that sort, I have never done this before. Please help!
Thanks in advance!
**EDIT
-This is all being done on a Windows 7 machine.
Since you're on Windows, open up a command line and run ipconfig to find out your local IP. It will be listed under 'IP Address'.
Tell people in your LAN to access http://192.168.x.x:3000 replacing 192.168.x.x by your IP address from step 1.
EDIT: One major thing that I missed, you are windows. On windows u could use thin and put it behind a load balancer. Although i would suggest hosting it on a UNIX machine :)
Although Running it in webrick(webrick is the application server for development i.e when u run rails s) will let other users access the website NEVER do the same for a production application. If you want to run this application in production, u need more powerful application servers like passenger. I would suggest you use it with Apache or Nginx instead of stand alone passenger. Once all this is setup others can use your application by entering the IP(xx.xx.xx.xx) also u can ask your system admin to setup a local DNS so your users need not remember the IP address always.
Description:
While starting Rails Server, we can also setup some options to configure the IP address and also the port number of the site under development environment to host the website in local network. So if we want to change the IP from http://127.0.0.1:3000 to http://192.168.x.x:port (x= 0 to 255 any one number), we can set that in Rails server command! But for this, we will need to find out our current IP address at our current network which will help us to serve the website in local network.
So at first step:
We will open our terminal on our PC. For Android user, we need to open Termux app. Then simply type ifconfig to get the IP address of our device in the current network. We will get an output like this one (Here I'm using Android device for development. So output might be something different than this one on your PC terminal but the process is same):
$ ifconfig
Warning: cannot open /proc/net/dev (Permission denied). Limited output.
lo: flags=XX<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING> mtu XXXXX
inet 127.0.0.1 netmask 255.XXX.XXX.XXX
unspec 00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00 txqueuelen XXXX (UNSPEC)
wlan0: flags=XXXX<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST> mtu XXXX
inet 192.168.1.103 netmask 255.XXX.XXX.XXX broadcast 192.168.1.255
unspec 00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00 txqueuelen XXXX (UNSPEC)
X= some numbers with our device credentials which is dummied with this variable
If you are using a WiFi router then we will need the wlan0 part to get our device IP. Under wlan0 section there is a subsection of inet showing our current IP! YUP, we need that IP address 192.168.1.103! This might be different for your device and network. This is the key of this mission! Now we're going to the second important step.
So the Second Step is:
That required input command to configure the IP address.
rails s -b 192.168.1.103 -p 8080
Here:
rails s for rails server
-b 192.168.1.103 for bidding the IP address for customisation from the default IP http://127.0.0.1 which is our localhost address.
-p 8080 for port setup. This part is optional. Default port is 3000.
This is the process of changing the localhost IP (http://127.0.0.1) to local network IP which will be available for other device of the same network user.
Now our rails app is available in our local network! Other users in the same network will also be able to visit the website while the server command is running. And the link will be http://192.168.1.103:8080 if you also configure the port number. Otherwise if you have used the command rails s -b 192.168.1.103 without port configuration the link will be: http://192.168.1.103:3000
Again: 192.168.1.103 was for my case, your IP address will be different for your device. That will be needed to use for your server and link address.

Remotely viewing web pages served by pow.cx

Using WEBrick you could navigate to an app you were serving from another device/virtual machine by navigating to your.ip.address.here:port
Is it possible to do something similar with pow.cx?
The latest version of Pow (0.4.0) now includes xip.io support. You can read about the release here.
Here's a quick explanation of how this helps Pow serve your Rails apps across your entire local network, from their post:
Say your development computer’s LAN IP address is 10.0.0.1. With the
new version of Pow, you can now access your app at
http://myapp.10.0.0.1.xip.io/. And xip.io supports wildcard DNS, so
any and all subdomains of 10.0.0.1.xip.io resolve too.
Here's a description of xip.io, from their site:
xip.io runs a custom DNS server on the public Internet. When your
computer looks up a xip.io domain, the xip.io DNS server extracts the
IP address from the domain and sends it back in the response.
There are basically two options:
Don't use pow: run your applications on localhost as usual and access them as usual
Edit the hosts file (or local DNS) to point your server machine ip
Example accessing from a virtual windows machine:
Suppose you are running two rails applications in pow: store.dev and auth.dev, and you want to access them from a windows xp virtual machine to test them with IE, you only need to edit your hosts file to add the lines:
C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
# Allow to access applications in pow.
# The ip address points to the host machine localhost, that usually is the default gateway
10.0.2.2 store.dev
10.0.2.2 auth.dev
And then open the IE browser to access your applications in http://store.dev and http://auth.dev respectivelly.
Specifically, no, because Pow uses the Host header of the request to determine which app you need to access. To get that working remotely, you would have to have the remote machine map the required domain name to your IP address - either with a local DNS server or by editing the HOSTS file. Both of which are possible but annoying.
The simplest thing to do in that case is to start up a standalone Rails server as you mentioned (using ./script/server or rails s depending on the version), and then you can address http://[ip address]:3000 as before.
In other words, Pow works because it intercepts your local domain resolution, something that isn't affected by (or available to) remote machines.

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