Exposing local server to the public internet

Intro

In days when we have cloud operator, exposing local server to the public internet is not a common thing to do. On other hand with IOT beign a thing, sometimes we want to have some device sitting in our private home network behind router nat accessible from internet.

Router port forwarding

In general typical home network consist of router, which is our gate to internet. Everything behind router sits in private network, to expose a server in this private network, router has to be configured to forward all trafic comming to it.

Keep in mind that this approach requires public ip assigned to our router from ISP.

In tp-link routers it looks like this:

• Forwarding -> Virtual Servers -> Add virtual server entry
  • service port - port that will be called from outside
  • internal port - port of our local server
  • ip address - local ip address to the server
  • protocol - tcp, udp or both can be chosen
  • status - turn off forwarding without deleting entry
  • common service port - configuration templates

Now check your public ip here and use it to access the server.

Aternatives

Alternatively there are tools that do all this trickery and more.They can even help you if you don’t have public ip. If interested check ngrok here.