Pow server: serving external domain via POW_EXT_DOMAINS

Question

Pow server is working fine with .dev domains on my local machine (OS X Lion). I now need it to serve an external domain because I'm developing an ecommerce site and my Payment Service Provider's system need to directly communicate with my development server. However I'm having trouble getting Pow to serve an external domain via the POW_EXT_DOMAINS environment variable.

Here's what I've done:

1. symlinked my rails app to ~/.pow/myapp (I can access it fine at http://myapp.dev)

2. Signed up for a free no-ip.org account and created a domain, e.g. myapp.no-ip.org, with an A record pointing to my external IP address

3. Set up port forwarding of port 80 on my router to my local machine

4. Set Pow's POW_EXT_DOMAINS environment variable to no-ip.org (export POW_EXT_DOMAINS=no-ip.org)

When I go to http://myapp.no-ip.org I can see the 'Pow is installed' splash screen, so I know the domain is reaching my machine. However Pow doesn't seem to recognise that an app is being requested.

Any ideas? Thanks in advance for any advice.

Answer 1

I got it working - here's the solution in case any one else has the same problem.

I had originally set the POW_EXT_DOMAINS variable by simply typing export POW_EXT_DOMAINS=no-ip.org in terminal.

Instead, you should create a pow config file at ~/.powconfig and put the command into that file:

export POW_EXT_DOMAINS=no-ip.org

Then restart pow by manually killing the process in activity monitor.

Pow then properly runs the myapp symlink when I access http://myapp.no-ip.org

Hope that helps someone else.