CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railsrubyfirewall
Giorgio
Giorgio

Reputation: 5183

No access to a rails server running behind a firewall

I am trying to run a ror application at a friend's home and the application is not reachable from the outside. Here is what we have tried.

The application has been created with

$ rails new <application name>

and started with

$ rails server

The development server starts and is reachable on http://localhost:3000

Next thing we have activated port forwarding on the router he uses to connect to the internet: we have mapped the external port 3000 to port 3000 on the internal host on which the rails server is running. When I try to open the page from the outside (with firefox) I get an error page: unable to conenct to host, the host may be down, try to connect later.

Things we have tried:

  1. Changed port forwarding 80 -> 80
  2. Installed and started Apache: the default Apache page is reachable.
  3. Stopped Apache and started the rails server on port 80 (with sudo, otherwise it can't use port 80): the rails server is not reachable.

I have also checked the firewall of the machine running the rails server. The OS is ubuntu 12.04: the firewall (at least ufw) is not active. I can also connect to that machine using port 22 / ssh.

Summarizing:

The only thing I can think of is that rails might have a mechanism similar to Django's ALLOWED_HOSTS and that it refuses external requests because they are for a different host than localhost. However, I haven't found anything on this topic. Also, the application's log files do not show any connection attempt that was refused by the rails server.

So we are out of ideas. What should we check next?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 2390

Answers (1)

Frederick Cheung
Frederick Cheung

Reputation: 84162

Prior to Rails 4.2, the default for rails server was to bind to all interfaces. In Rails 4.2 this changed to only bind to 127.0.0.1 by default - there's nothing in the application logs because the socket is simply not listening to connection on other network interfaces.

To allow connections from another machine you need to use the -b option to bind to extra ip addresses, eg

rails s  -b 0.0.0.0

to bind to all available ip addresses. You can of course replace 0.0.0.0 with one of your machine's actual ip addresses although you would of course have to change that invocation whenever your machine's ip address changed.

Upvotes: 10

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