Browser-sync in mobile while local development

Question

How can I view my local dev website in my phone using gulp Browser-sync? I type localhost:3000 in my phones browser but it won\'t load

Answer 1

I know this is old, but the above option didn't work for me, and I'm running windows 10. I eventually found a solution using the tunnel option which is completely hassle-free.

For instance, setting as an option tunnel: true will generate a random public URL each time you run BrowserSync: e.g. http://randomstring23232.localtunnel.me

However, you can set a preferred tunnel name by passing it as a string to the tunnel option, i.e. tunnel: 'preferredtunnelname', which will reproduce: https://preferredtunnelname.localtunnel.me

References here: https://github.com/BrowserSync/browser-sync/issues/390 and https://browsersync.io/docs/options/#option-tunnel

Answer 2

Thanks to @Kwesi for sharing above. In my case, setting tunnel:true alone didn't work until I also added online:true. Here's my sample code - worked fine on both computer and mobile device.

browserSync.init({
    server: {
      baseDir: "app"
    },
    online: true,
    tunnel: true,
    logLevel: "debug"
  });

Answer 3

When you run gulp in your terminal you should see :

    [BS] Access URLs:
 --------------------------------------
       Local: http://localhost:3000
    External: http://192.168.10.81:3000
 --------------------------------------
          UI: http://localhost:3001
 UI External: http://192.168.10.81:3001

What it means is that your local URL is localhost at port 3000. For external users it will be the external IP [ not the UI one ]. To access from your phone you need to enter the External IP along with its port in your phone's browser.

You can view all your browser-sync settings by visiting the UI IP.

Note : For the external link to work on your phone, your phone and computer should be on the same Wi-Fi Network, only then it will work.