Wordpress Hosted on my Laptop

I have been developing a Wordpress blog using the Bitnami stack running on my laptop. My laptop is connected to my home network, which includes a Netgear Router. I put the Wordpress stack on my USB card, just for portability. But when I disconnected my laptop from my home network today to go meet with a friend, I couldn’t startup the Wordpress site and demonstate it, because Safari said,

“Safari can’t open the page “http://192.168.0.4/wordpress/wp-admin/edit.php” because it can’t find the server “192.168.0.4”.

Suffice it to say, that this problem will be obvious to someone experienced, but to a first timer, I don’t know what’s happening with the Apache server and my router. I thought I could run the stack on my laptop independent of any router. I guess not. I know this is not a Bitnami issue, but I think this is a great lesson for Wordpress users, and people who want to install the Bitnami stack on their laptop.

Do I have to have a router connected? Why did this error happen? Should I configure my Wordpress or Apache installation differently?

Hi pypo,

Unfortunately Wrodpress need a static ip to other users can access to wordpress. In your case wordpress has been installed at “192.168.0.4” ip so you can not access if you change your network ip. You can select the machine ip during the installation. You have two possibilities:

1) If you select the 127.0.0.1 ip (the local ip), your wordpress is always running at this ip. if you change the network is also running but other computers can not access to your wordpress.

2) If you select your public ip (192.168.X.X or another diferent to 127.X.X.X) other users can access to your wordpress remotely but you can not change the network ip because probably your ip will be changed.

I hope it helps you.