How can i access a second laravel app from another pc - php

Question

On this link:
how can i access my laravel app from another pc?
It is perfectly described how to access an laravel app from another pc on the same network.
Now, my question is:
How to access another app served on the same pc?
I have a virtual machine serving two apps app.dev and demo.dev
both are accessible inside VM through internet browser
app.dev is accessible on http://localhost and http://app.dev
demo.dev is accessible only on http://demo.dev
Outside VM only app.dev is accessible on IP address 192.168.0.60
i have used this command inside VM
sudo php artisan serve --host 192.168.0.60 --port 80
Should i use again
sudo php artisan serve ????
but how? anybody help?

Answer 1

Laravel's artisan serve command uses the PHP Built-in web server. Because that is not a full featured web server, it has no concept of virtual hosts, so it can only run one instance of the server mapped to an IP and port pair.
Normally to serve two hosts from the same IP address you'd add in your VM's /etc/hosts file the following mappings:
192.168.0.60 app.dev
192.168.0.60 demo.dev
Now you can run app.dev by running:
php artisan serve --host app.dev --port 80
And it will be available on your host machine using http://app.dev. However if you would try to spin up a second server instance for demo.dev using this:
php artisan serve --host demo.dev --port 80
It won't work and will complain that:
Address already in use
You could get around that by using a different port for your demo.dev app by using for example this:
php artisan serve --host demo.dev --port 8080
And now you'd be able to access http://demo.dev:8080 for your second app on your host machine.
That being said, I suggest you install a full featured web server such as Apache or nginx and then setup a virtual host for each application (just make sure to keep the mappings from the /etc/hosts file I showcased above).
Setting up virtual hosts can be really easy for both server solutions. Below are links to two articles from the Laravel Recipes website that showcase how to do that specifically for Laravel:
Creating an Apache VirtualHost
Creating a Nginx VirtualHost