How to Access IIS Express from Network

How to Access IIS Express from Network

IIS Express is a very light weight and self contained version of IIS which is completely optimized for the development. IIS really makes it easy to use the most current version of IIS to develop and test the application without installing and configuring the complete IIS web server on your local machine. You don’t need to be an IT expert to view your website while developing. everything will be done automatically by visual studio.

In case you are developing a website and like to share it with your colleague working next to your seat and also don’t like to configure a complete IIS web server on your machine. Adding IIS web server on your machine can make it slow because of the memory and CPU requirement.

IIS express is only available for the localhost and you will not be able to access your website from local network or even from public IP address because IIS express is only meant to be used locally. Many articles are written to change config file and add a new line with port and IP address of your system and restart the application which didn’t worked for me at least.

I would like to share this very simple and easy to follow method to make the changes and access your website while under development from network computers.

First you need to install a simple module on your system and then it will be configured with just simple commands.

Install listed module on your development machine:

iisexpress-proxy

Once your are done with the installation of the this module at a global level. Now you need to configure a NAT rule so that an external port can connect to internet port of your application.

iisexpress-proxy localPort to proxyPort

The application is configured with a random port but it remains same once assigned to the application. In my case it was 50798.

iisexpress-proxy 50798 to 8888

In this way you can use your external IP Address of your system to access the under development applications from other systems working on the local area network. You can configure another NAT rule on your internet gateway so that the application can also be accessed from internet. Please read the NAT rules for more information.

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