Connecting to web app running on localhost on an Amazon EC2 from another computer

Question

currently I am working on a web app development and I am running my server on an Amazon ec2 instance. I am testing my (web app which uses Flask) by running the server on localhost:5000 as usual. However I don't have access to the gui hence I don't see my app and test it like I would do on a browser. I have a Mac OS X computer so my question is how can I see the localhost of Amazon EC2 from my mac's browser ?

Solution 1

You need to tell the Flask Dev webserver to run on 0.0.0.0 instead of localhost.

You specify this option when calling the .run() function:

app.run(host='0.0.0.0', debug=True, port=5000)

If you then send a request to the Public IP of your EC2 instance on port 5000 you will reach your Flask Dev webserver.

eg: http://EC2_IP:5000/

Hope this helps :)

Solution 2

You cannot connect to localhost on a remote machine without a proxy. If you want to test it you will need to change the binding to the public IP address or 0.0.0.0.

You will then have to lock down access to your own IP address through the security settings in AWS.

Comments

[user391339]

you likely need to create a security group setting and then apply it to the ec2 instance for this to work. also if you are running this from the terminal, type flask run --help to get acquainted or flask run -h 0.0.0.0 -p 5000