Running Django server on localhost

Question

I would like to run a Django server locally using a local IP.

I have localhost mapped here:

$ head -n 1 /etc/hosts
127.0.0.1   localhost

I have this chunk of code in my settings.py:

import os
ALLOWED_HOSTS = ['HERE.IS.MY.IP', 'localhost', '127.0.0.1']
print "ALLOWED_HOSTS: {}".format(ALLOWED_HOSTS)

In my mysql database I have this site table:

mysql> select * from django_site;
+----+--------------------+----------------+
| id | domain             | name           |
+----+--------------------+----------------+
|  1 | example.com        | example.com    |
|  5 | HERE.IS.MY.IP:8000 | projectsdb     |
|  8 | 127.0.0.1:8000     | projectsdb     |
|  9 | localhost:8000     | projectsdb     |
+----+--------------------+----------------+

I run the server locally on 127.0.0.1:

$ python manage.py runserver 8000
ALLOWED_HOSTS: ['HERE.IS.MY.IP', 'localhost', '127.0.0.1']

Performing system checks...
# ...
Django version 1.10.5, using settings 'mysite.settings'
Starting development server at http://127.0.0.1:8000/
Quit the server with CONTROL-C.

If I go to this address http://HERE.IS.MY.IP:8000 it works. But of course I'd like to open it using a local IP such as http://localhost:8000 or http://127.0.0.1:8000. But this does not work. What am I missing?

Answer 1

Ok I solved it, silly me. I thought I was trying to access the server's page locally, but I wasn't. The server is running on a specific machine, and I was trying to access it locally from another machine (my laptop).

Explanations: The server runs on HERE.IS.MY.IP:8000, only locally because I only gave the port 8000:

$ python manage.py runserver 8000

I am trying to access the server from the web browser on my laptop, so the IP used is different than HERE.IS.MY.IP. If I want to access the page on http://HERE.IS.MY.IP:8000 from my laptop I have no other choice than to allow the server access to external machines by running the server like this:

$ python manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000

or

$ python manage.py runserver HERE.IS.MY.IP:8000

and then to access it on my laptop's browser with the full IP (unless I map it on /etc/hosts) on http://HERE.IS.MY.IP:8000

Now if I want to access the page locally only from the server side, I have to run

$ python manage.py runserver 8000

, open a browser from the said server and then I can contact the pages http://HERE.IS.MY.IP:8000, http://127.0.0.1:8000 and http://localhost:8000 successfully.

So my mistake here was that I was accessing the server's page not from the server's browser itself but from another machine's.