Accessing Sites from Host

Woops, I hit save instead of preview and hadn't finished editing. I meant to say...

At the moment, to access a site in the guest from the host I change

	DocumentRoot /var/www
	<Directory />
		Options FollowSymLinks
		AllowOverride None
	</Directory>
	<Directory /var/www>
		Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
		AllowOverride None
		Order allow,deny
		allow from all
	</Directory>

to

	DocumentRoot /home/quickstart/websites/example.dev
	<Directory />
		Options FollowSymLinks
		AllowOverride None
	</Directory>
	<Directory /home/quickstart/websites/example.dev>
		Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
		AllowOverride None
		Order allow,deny
		allow from all
	</Directory>

and then change networking from NAT to Bridged and run

sudo apache2ctl restart

Is there a more elegant solution for this?

Would it be possible to have something like 'localhost/mysites' or 'localhost:8080' point to '/home/quickstart/websites'? With an appropriate .htaccess in that directory one could access all of the sites on the guest from the host.

I have found Firefox, Chrome and Chromium all have random problems with JavaScript and Flash so it's really important to be able to check sites with browsers on Mac / Windows.

Forgot to say, also have to change a line in 'example.dev' in the 'config' dir to the current IP of the guest.

from

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName example.dev

to

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName 192.168.0.8

And then type the IP into a browser on the host to access the site.

Is really not a very elegant solution the problem, but it works for the moment. Any thoughts on how to improve?

Whilst writing the above, I got to thinking about different ways to approach this problem. At the risk of turning this support request in to a stream of consciousness I'll post a new (simpler) solution.

First, add a new listening port to Apache. In this example I'm going to use port 55555.

In ports.conf located at

/home/quickstart/websites/config/ports.conf

Add this line to the end of the file

NameVirtualHost *:55555
Listen 55555

Now we tell apache to point this port to example.dev. Edit the file at

/home/websites/config/apache-sites-enabled/example.dev

and change the first line

<VirtualHost *:80>

to

<VirtualHost *:55555>

In the terminal, restart Apache

sudo apache2ctl restart

Ensure that networking mode is Bridged rather than NAT.

You should now be able to access example.dev from a browser on the host (or any other machine on the network) by entering the guests IP and sites port number. In my case this is

http://192.168.0.8:55555

or on the guest at

http://localhost:55555

This procedure can be followed for any number of sites - just use different port numbers for each.

edit: There's a solution for the same issue on a quickstart handbook page. But this one is not dependent on fixed IPs or making changes to the host OS.