Serve Jekyll on Wifi

Localhost. It’s local and it’s a host but what good does that do you when you want to check in on your locally runnying jekyll blog that only you read from your bed on your phone?

Easy peasy.

jekyll serve --host 0.0.0.0

Then run up ifconfig (assuming you’re mac-ing) and look for the inet on your en0 interface. That’s your IP on your network. On mine, it’s 10.0.1.95 and this is what it looks like:

Now make sure your phone is on the same wifi network, hit http://10.0.1.95:4000 from your phone and… oh yeah. Your sweet sweet blog. Just for you. From your computer via wifi to your phone. Pretty soon you’re gonna be your own ISP, amirite?

Yes, but why? When Jekyll runs locally it defaults to only listening for traffic on localhost, which only comes from… local… host? So if you want that webrick listening on your actual ethernet channel for connections, set it to 0.0.0.0 and that does the trick!