Failing to Connect to Rails Server on VM // AndyHsu's Blog

I’ve been using vagrant to set up ruby on rails project environment, which is best practice in my opinion. One can perfectly and easily have a clean envrionment, in my case, ubuntu64 to put the whole rails server in while coding in familiar platform using favourite editor.

Usually, I would type in shell the following commands

vagrant up
vagrant ssh
cd <project folder>
rails s

the server is up and I can open Chrome on MacOS and type in [project-name].dev:3000 to have a look at the website under development. [project-name].dev is an alias to the IP address of the virtual machine. It’s all beautiful.

However, when I set up a new project today as usual and open up a browser, the server did not respond.

At first I thought it was the rails’s problem. So I tried to connect to the server locally with telnet.

1
2
3

telnet localhost 3000
GET / HTTP/1.0
Content-Type:text/html; charset=UTF-8

which performed perfectly.

It turns out that when I http request [project-name].dev:3000, the server received nothing at all. Though I still don’t get what’s different from the previous ones, I forced the server listen to the ip address on start up and the problem is solved.

1	rails s -b 192.168.34.34

The server listens to http://localhost:3000 by default, then the problem is how the previous ones worked… LOL