Rihards Steinbergs

While typically I prefer something like Drupal VM over Acquia Dev Desktop (and that’s a different topic) I’ve found myself using Dev Desktop more recently, due to how easy, reliably, and quickly it can spin up new copies of Drupal.

For a project I just recently had to test and fix some Internet Explorer issues. Usually I’d use something like BrowserStack, but it happened to be so that I was working from home where I have access to my PC, so I thought why not use that. It would be native testing and overall a smoother experience than BrowserStack (debugging IE11 on BrowserStack can get very frustrating).

Acquia Dev Desktop is meant for local development, and I didn’t want to push the site to Acquia Cloud just to test a couple of IE issues.

So here’s how to make it possible to access your Acquia Dev Desktop sites from another device.

In my setup, I’m using OS X and the test device is a Windows 10 PC, so the instructions are based around those, but they can be modified for other setups as well.

1. Install, develop, test, etc. your site as usually through Dev Desktop
2. Figure out your local IP on OS X this can be done in terminal by running ifconfig | grep inet or opening Network preferences in System Preferences, the IP address will be listed under the Status of the connection that you are currently using.
3. Next you’ll want to edit the hosts file of the device you plan to test from. In my case it’s Windows 10, so the file is c:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc\hosts and you’ll want to add an entry there like: 192.168.100.10 drupal8.dd replacing the IP address with the one you found earlier, and drupal8.dd with the actual local site URL that you have configured in Dev Desktop.
4. Dev Desktop configures sites to be only accessible from the local machine, so you’ll need to edit the Virtual Hosts config file to change this. On OS X this file can typically be found at /Applications/DevDesktop/apache/conf/vhosts.conf, find the entry for your site there and right before Require local add Require 192.168 replacing the IP address with the first two numbers of your local network IP. For example, if the IP address from earlier is something like 10.0.0.101 then use Require 10.0
5. Restart Acquia Dev Desktop or Stop and Start Apache and MySQL in Dev Desktop
6. Open http://drupal8.dd:8083 (replacing the address with the one you’ve configured above) in your browser.
7. Test your heart out and have fun!

If you have any questions or feedback you can reach me easiest on Twitter @rihards