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apachelocalhostwampwampserver

WAMP localhost redirects to my IP

I had to recently wipe my PC and I'm setting up my development environment again using WAMP.

After installing WAMP, if I visit http://localhost instead of seeing the WAMP homepage I get redirected to http://x.x.x.x, where x.x.x.x is my IP.

I had this issue on another PC and after setting the inbound rules for Apache HTTP Server in my Windows Firewall settings to allow all domains it fixed the issue. I applied this to my PC, and the issue does not seem to be present for Internet Explorer, whereas for Chrome and Firefox the localhost to my IP redirect issue persists even after clearing the cache for each browser.

My C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts file looks like this:

127.0.0.1       localhost
::1             localhost

and my firewall rules look like this:

enter image description here

I am not currently using vhosts and I'm on a network at my workplace (if that has any implications?)

I also encountered the same issue when using Laragon which uses vhosts and whenever I visited a virtual host, e.g. mysite.dev it didn't work properly either.

My question on the Laragon forum: https://forum.laragon.org/topic/126/accessing-mysite-dev-redirects-to-url-which-shows-index-php-at-root-folder/3

Solution

  • The Problem

    I'm behind a proxy which is used for browsing the web at my workplace. The proxy seemed to be messing up the dns resolution whenever I made a call to localhost (when using wamp) or one of my vhosts (when using Laragon).

    This was clear as when I ran the following from the command line: ping site.dev I was getting the expected response from 127.0.0.1. However, when going to site.dev in my browser I was getting redirected to my IP, so essentially my etc/hosts file was being ignored for dns resolution.

    The difference between the two being that the browser is using the proxy whereas the command line isn't!

    The Solution

    After trying many different solutions which seemed to work for localhost (on wamp) only, but not vhosts (on Laragon) I finally got to the solution which was actually so simple!

    So, for chrome I simply went to chrome://settings/ > Network - Change proxy settings > LAN Settings > Proxy Server - Advanced

    Then in the Exceptions text box I added the following:

    *.dev;localhost;127.0.0.1

    Here's a screenshot of my settings from Chrome/Internet Options

    enter image description here

    And that did the trick! Hope this can help someone else.