1

I'm running virtualbox locally and I've used port forwarding like this

0.0.0.0:7000 -> 0.0.0.0:7000

so that I can do

curl http://localhost:7000

from host to vm and be able to communicate with the application running in the vm and listening to port 7000.

Is it possible to make the reverse? I want to set a port forward to be able to

curl http://localhost:6000

from my vm and be able to communicate with the app that runs on host and listens on port 6000.

I'm using NAT.

I already know about bridged network and about using the network IP of my host. I can't use those. All I'm interested in is the above.

Exclaimer:

The reason of the limitations above is because I'm using dinghy with docker and docker-machine. If I change the network to something else than NAT the setup will break. Moreover I can't use something else than localhost since these are the defaults that the apps have and I need them to communicate as if they were running both on host.

Alkis Kalogeris
  • 17,044
  • 15
  • 59
  • 113
  • So docker runs inside vm? What's the host OS? – Xiongbing Jin Apr 22 '16 at 01:05
  • I'm sorry, I forgot to add that, Mac OSX El Capitan – Alkis Kalogeris Apr 22 '16 at 04:14
  • 1
    I think there are three possible options: 1. Setup an SSH tunnel with `ssh -R`, see http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/46235/how-does-reverse-ssh-tunneling-work. 2. Setup Nginx or Apache reverse proxy on the vm to forward traffic to host. 3. Force the VM to think `localhost` is your host ip by adding it to the `/etc/hosts` file (this has the potential risk of breaking other services that may depend on localhost being 127.0.0.1) – Xiongbing Jin Apr 22 '16 at 05:02
  • @warmoverflow can you add your comment as an answer so I can accept it? – Alkis Kalogeris Apr 23 '16 at 20:09
  • @alkis can you recommend some source how to do port forwarding for docker to run localhost on browser? – NeiL Nov 25 '16 at 06:28

1 Answers1

1

Possible options:

  1. Setup an SSH tunnel with ssh -R, see https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/46235/how-does-reverse-ssh-tunneling-work

  2. Setup Nginx or Apache reverse proxy on the vm to forward traffic to host.

  3. Force the VM to think localhost is your host ip by adding it to the /etc/hosts file (this has the potential risk of breaking other services that may depend on localhost being 127.0.0.1)

Community
  • 1
  • 1
Xiongbing Jin
  • 11,779
  • 3
  • 47
  • 41