How to serve a website over a wifi without internet?

Question

I want to serve a website over an open wifi connection but I do not want this wifi connection to have access to the internet. Is this possible and how would I go about doing it.

I have setup websites locally and have gotten access in the browser through localhost or the IP address but I am not sure how I would go about setting up a webserver and serving the website via wifi.

Any insight on this?

Answer 1

you can access your machine's localhost via any computer easily, as long as that computer is connected to the said wifi.

get your computer name, and access it from other machine like this:

http://<your_computer_name_here:port_if_applicable>/website_folder_name

I do this to test my websites on mac and windows at home. My windows machine is called "The-Genius" and I access it via my mac like this:

http://The-Genius/Test/

which leads to the IIS.. if I want to access Apache, which is on port 78, I do this:

http://The-Genius:78/Test/

Hope it helps..

Answer 2

If you are using a wifi router, you don't have to do anything to get this to work. Whenever a client connects over wifi, they will be able to type in your webserver's IP address to see the website. If you want to use a DNS name then you might be able to set up the DNS names on the router itself.