How do I make my ruby on rails app respond to exte

Question

Problem: My rails app (on my local machine) only responds to requests sent from the same machine to localhost, 127.0.0.1, or my internal ip address. When I try to hit it using my internet ip or from any other machine, inside or outside of my network, it just times out. I'm on Mac OS 10.9.1, ruby 1.9.3, rails 4.0.0.

I've done a lot of searching but all I can find is problems where people didn't forward their ports or bind the right ip.

Here are the areas I've investigated:

Ports - I've tried several different ports. I configured my router to forward every port I tried but got the same result. I thought maybe there was a problem with the router so I built a simple server in Java and bound all the same ports I was binding with my rails app. Sure enough, when I hit the Java app using my internet ip it worked just fine so the router/firewall/port forwarding isn't the problem. Also, I run an apache server on port 80 and that has never had any problems. I turned apache off and tried port 80 for my rails app but that didn't fix the problem.

Rails Server - I started with WEBrick and I thought that perhaps there was some setting inside that blocked external requests. I searched google extensively and found nothing on that matter. Just to be safe I installed Thin and got the exact same result I did with WEBrick. One interesting thing is that when the rails server is started, the external request takes a long time to time-out, but the server console displays no output at all. However if I try to send the same request w/out starting the server at all it fails immediately.

User Permissions - I started the server with root (i'm starting to just shoot in the dark here) and it had no effect.

Environment - I was starting in development environment originally because I'm developing but just for fun I tried starting in production and it also made no difference.

PLEASE HELP ME SMART PEOPLE

Update: I installed the app on my Ubuntu machine and it doesn't have this problem! So that suggests the problem may have something to do with Mac OS.

SOLVED: It turns out that in the System Preferences -> Security & Privacy -> Firewall in Mac OS, it was somehow set to block incoming connections to Ruby 1.9.3. I must have accidentally set that some time ago.

Answer 1

With any local server, you'll need to correctly configure port forwarding on your firewall. Like said by CaptChrisD, tests must be done by an external IP/browser (if you own a server, ssh on it, then w3m to test).

I already had same symptom (server started => timeout, server stopped => fail) and the origin was an issue with firewall configuration. I think it is your problem.

With MacOS, Pow is really awesome: installation is easy, no configuration required (no /etc/hosts…). Moreover, they give you a hook for external access to your virtualhosts (but you still need port forwarding on your firewall).

Otherwise, there is other solutions like Forward to do it without firewall configuration (30-days free trial).

Hope this helps!

Answer 2

The problem is you are probably trying to request the page from your local machine (or any computer on your local network, behind your firewall) to your public IP expecting a result... not unless you setup routes through your firewall for this (and not usually available on a consumer level router... linksys, dlink, etc)

So forward port 80 if you are using something like pow, or 3000 for web bricks default port to your local machine

Then have someone outside your local lan request your external (public) IP

Answer 3

This may be related: Rails 3.1 on Ubuntu 11.10 under VirtualBox very slow

Your mention of slowness combined with the use of webrick makes me think you've got some reverse-DNS lookup awfulness going on. A quick first step is hacking /etc/hosts to bypass this lookup.

The situation I dealt with on Ubuntu was solved in the short-term by hacking /etc/hosts. You could do this quick hack in order to see if it is indeed just webrick's reverse-DNS lookup. Edit /etc/hosts and add a line for the external user's IP address, something like this:

156.123.48.55 TestPerson

Replace the IP address with the tester's IP address. Since you said you can get the external request to hit an Apache server on port 80, you can grab their IP address from the Apache access logs if necessary, otherwise just ask the person testing.

You could also try a different web server, such as unicorn, which may help out. Add "gem unicorn-rails" to your Gemfile, run bundle install, and then (according to their docs), rails server will just use unicorn directly.