Advice on wifi dev server on MAC for browsersync

[damon]

I’m trying to figure out a nice way to get a local url for development on my Mac that’s accessible over wifi.

I’m not doing any backend code right now (maybe later) so I don’t need/want to rely on php or ruby or whatnot.

I looked at
http://mallinson.ca/osx-web-development/
and a bunch of articles,
but not all of them talk about routing to the network ie using your computer as a server and how that might integrate with fun tools like dnsmasq and build tools like assemble and browsersync..

Where might I wanna look to get this setup?

[damon]

hm that looks cool.. BUT i don’t want to expose to the outside world… just local wifi.. I think exposing outside would technically be a security risk;

so i guess i just need to properly route the incoming connections to my local IP.

But.. it would be cool if the address was something human readable instead of an IP (like damon.dev). BUT I don’t have access to any network/router settings..

I am just a bit thick when it comes to all the moving pieces involved in this.. I know grunt serve sets me up a local thing on 127.0.0.1:9000.. but that is not accessible to the network or virtual machines on my mac (for the IE testing)

[Tom]

You might want to take a look at Vagrant. You can set up a VM with it and make it available to your network, even give it a human readable URL. There are a ton of video’s and articles about how to set it up so just google it to get a basic understanding.

[Senff]

I agree that Vagrant would be an all-purpose solution. However it may be a bit TOO much if you just want the wifi part (it’s not super beginner easy to set up and such, and takes a little bit to get used to).

Have you tried Prepros? Although it’s mainly a tool for preprocessing Sass and LESS and all that, it also has a built-in webserver. I’m not 100% sure, but I believe it can generate a URL (based on the computer’s IP address) that you can access from any computer on the same network. You can develop a site on your Mac and you can view it on another computer or phone or tablet or anything.

[damon]

Prepros looks like it would do the trick but it’s also involving a whole bunch of other stuff that is free and already covered by Grunt

I’ve used vagrant before and could again.. but this is just front endy code compiling handlebars templates with assemble, so having a virtual machine running seems like it’d be too memory intensive.

I wasn’t sure if browsersync would do something in that area itself.

Actually after looking around a bit more http://anvilformac.com/ combined with http://xip.io/ looks like it might work pretty well here..

[Author]

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