How to browse localhost on Android device?

to access localhost on emulator: 10.0.2.2. However this may not always work for example if you have something other than a web server such as XMPP server.

assuming that you're on the same wireless network...

1. find your local ip (should be something 192.168.1.x) - go to the command line and type 'ipconfig' to get this. where x is the assigned local ip of the server machine.

2. use your local ip for your android device to connect to your localhost.

it worked for me.

Mac OSX Users

If your phone and laptop are on the same wifi:

Go to System Preferences > Network to obtain your IP address

On your mobile browser, type [your IP address]:3000 to access localhost:3000

e.g. 12.45.123.456:3000

For the mac user:

I have worked on this problem for one afternoon until I realized the Xampp I used was not the real "Xampp" It was Xampp VM which runs itself based on a Linux virtual machine. That made it not running on localhost, instead, another IP. I installed the real Xampp and run my local server on localhost and then just access it with the IP of my mac.

Hope this will help someone.

I had similar issue but I could not resolve it using static ip address or changing firewall settings. I found a useful utility which can be configured in a minute.

We can host our local web server on cloud for free. On exposing it on cloud we get a different URL which we can use instead of localhost and access the webserver from anywhere.

The utility is ngrok https://ngrok.com/download Steps:

1. Signup
2. Download
3. Extract the file and double click to run it, this will open a command prompt
4. Type "ngrok.exe http 80" without quotes to host for example XAMPP apache server which runs on port 80.
5. Copy the new url name generated on the cmd prompt for e.g. if it is like this "fafb42f.ngrok.io"

URL like : http://localhost/php/test.php Should be modified like this : http://fafb42f.ngrok.io/php/test.php

Now this URL can be accessed from phone.

I use testproxy to do this.

npm install testproxy

testproxy http://10.0.2.2

You then get the url (and QR code) you can access on your mobile device. It even works with virtual machines you can't reach by just entering the IP of your dev machine.

I used ngrok but now it need registration and it also has a connections request limit. Now I'm using LocalTunnel and so far it's much better.