How to make a TeamCity server visible to other users
I have a TeamCity server set up on a local environment. Now I want other users to be able to access the web UI, however, they cant as this is on localhost:8111. How do I let other people on my network access the UI? Do I have to set up a proxy server? Do I need to set this up through IIS?
I'm new to TeamCity and networking/domains etc in general. Apologies if this is already in the docs, I'm sure it is, I just dont know what I'm looking for.
Any help would be much appreciated.
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I'm afraid this topic is not covered per-se on the documentation, mainly because it's not teamcity related, it's pretty much exclusively a networking issue and covering it is really hard since it depends on almost every single component of your infrastructure.
As a general rule of thumb, any process should be able to connect to your teamcity by just entering <your_ip>:8111 as long as the server is up and running. If your network supports it, maybe using your hostname instead of IP could work. This does require direct connectivity, that the routing is properly set up in the network to enable that, that firewalls do not prevent external connections, etc. Proxies or reverse proxies can allow for some options, but don't remove the rest of the requirements. Domains can be used to use a domain name instead of an IP or hostname, but still don't change any of the above.
If you are part of a larger organization you should probably ask your network admins if there is anything that doesn't work, as they might need to enable routing or firewall rules. If that's not the case and direct access doesn't work, you will need to verify the components described above on your own. Typically this involves ensuring you are on the same network or tweaking your router to route incoming connections to the appropriate device and port, and ensuring that your OS firewall (common in windows) is not preventing incoming connections.
Putting aside any concerns around security or user access policies, if you need to quickly provide access to a locally running web server, you can use something like ngrok, which creates a publicly available URL for your local TeamCity instance:
If you have ngrok installed, the above will create a tunnel that proxies http from a newly generated public URL (e.g. http://92832de0.ngrok.io; the actual URL is included in the output) to localhost:8111.
As was mentioned earlier, if you are part of a larger organization, you may want to check with your network admins on whether ngrok can be used in your network and what the licensing implications are for your use-case, if any.
Thank you both for your input. I'm going to have to wait until the build server is further developed in order to decide how to best deal with this problem.
The IP certainly works for now, which is really helpful. I'd like to turn this into something a little more user friendly in the future in which case ngrok may be a good option. Thanks!