The service xip.io can make short work of this. Here's how:
As an example, I have the following Homesite app setup, 'rentmanager.test'. This is the first application I provisioned on Homestead, so it's the default route. To access this from my local network, all I have to do is go to:
http://rentmanager.test.192.168.5.124.xip.io:8000
Where 'rentmanager.test.' is the name of my Laravel application on Homestead, '192.166.5.124.' is my IP address on the local network, 'xip.io:8000' is the redirect service domain and the needed port to access the app (8000) outside of the default routing that Homestead sets up.
Now, this works fine out of the box with the first site you provision, but what happens if we have more than one site? That requires a little more legwork. Let's assume we've got a second app called 'sitescanner.test' that we want to access. If I try to access the same URL above with the new app URL, you'll see I'm still served the first application! Let's resolve that as well.
First, you're going to need to add an additional rule to your hosts file. So, assuming our new app is called 'sitescanner.test':
# Vagrant Sites External Access
192.168.10.10 sitescanner.test.192.168.5.124.xip.io
Once that's in place then we have to update the provisioning scripts in Homestead to create the correct virtual host entries so Homestead knows how to route the request. To do that, we'll edit your Homestead.yaml. Under the 'sites:' directive:
- map: sitescanner.test
to: /home/vagrant/Code/sitescanner/public
- map: sitescanner.test.192.168.5.124.xip.io
to: /home/vagrant/Code/sitescanner/public
Once this is complete, simply 'vagrant halt' (if it's already running), then 'vagrant up --provision' and you should be able to access your site from
http://sitescanner.test.192.168.5.124.xip.io:8000
Anywhere on your network! Hope this helps.
While I'm thinking about it, there is a final consideration for this configuration:
- You may want to set a static IP address on your host machine if possible. If you're being assigned a dynamic IP address via DHCP it's possible (and likely) for this configuration to eventually break if you're ever assigned a new IP.