Vagrant Prerequisites

If you’re using the Vagrant virtual machine from earlier in this course you will need to make a slight modification to the configuration of this machine to make your web server accessible. This step is not related to configuring a web server in general, it’s just a condition of our current environment. You would not need to complete this step if you were configuring a machine from a cloud provider like Amazon Web Services.

Open the Vagrantfile in your project directory and look for the following section near lines 20-23:

# Create a forwarded port mapping which allows access to a specific port
# within the machine from a port on the host machine. In the example below,
# accessing "localhost:8080" will access port 80 on the guest machine.
# config.vm.network "forwarded_port", guest: 80, host: 8080

Uncomment the last line:

config.vm.network "forwarded_port", guest: 80, host: 8080

Save the file and start your Vagrant virtual machine using the vagrant up command. If your virtual machine is currently running, you can reload it using the vagrant reload command.

This configuration change will setup port forwarding from port 8080 on the host machine (your computer) to the guest machine (your Vagrant virtual machine) when your virtual machine is running. This will allow you to access your web server using the URL http://localhost:8080.

Compatibility note

On some Windows systems, you will need to add one more argument to the line to ensure that the VM network connects to the correct interface on your host computer:

config.vm.network "forwarded_port", guest: 80, host: 8080, host_ip: "127.0.0.1"