How to enable wordpress website locally on network

Question

My wordpress site works fine on my mac via localhost, using Xammp. I want to view the site on my iPhone. So I type in 192.168.0.2 and voila, it brings up my localhost directory. I then click on the site in question and the content is there but no styling or images. I realise that this is because the paths to all the resources is hardcoded into the wordpress database. So when I am accessing the url via 192.168.0.2/mywebsitename on my iPhone, it's looking for all the resources using a base url of localhost/mywebsitename. Localhost path doesn't exist on my iPhone, only 192.168.0.2 does.

So has anyone found a solution to this little issue? How can I see a wordpress installation by ip address and by localhost access?

Answer 1

For this exact issue, before developing a website. You must create a domain(VirtualHost in apache)

Add the following contents in the file httpd-vhosts.conf, make sure it is included in Apache Configuration. This line ( Include conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf ) should be present in httpd.conf

Contents of httpd-vhosts.conf:

NameVirtualHost 192.168.1.26:80
<VirtualHost 192.168.1.26:80>
<Directory "e:/program files/ampps/www/mywebsite">
Options FollowSymLinks Indexes
AllowOverride All
Order deny,allow
allow from All
</Directory>
ServerName 192.168.1.26
ServerAlias 192.168.1.26
ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ "e:/program files/ampps/www/mywebsite/cgi-bin/"
DocumentRoot "e:/program files/ampps/www/mywebsite"
ErrorLog "E:/Program Files/ampps/apache/logs/192.168.1.26.err"
CustomLog "E:/Program Files/ampps/apache/logs/192.168.1.26.log" combined
</VirtualHost>

(Change the path, ip, etc according to your need). Now after adding the contents. Restart Apache. Now when you access 192.168.1.26 (in my case) from other machine in your network or your same machine. You should see the contents of mywebsite folder directly(or contents index.php if it has any). Now install wordpress using the ip you specified(browser should have that ip in the address bar), in my case 192.168.1.26.

Well I use AMPPS to avoid this headache. It allows me to create domains locally. Also if I have bought a domain say mywebsite.com and i want to add a customized wordpress site on, I create a the domain in the AMPPS with the same name. So the URL of my live website and the local are same. :) Then I simply put the files directly on my server via FTP and obviously import the database on my server.

EDIT: BTW, AMPPS allows to install WordPress in a single click. It has simple interface where you can specify AMPPS to install the WordPress on the created Domain.