Flask assign public IP

Question

I am trying to make my api to be have public IP using waitress or normal flask connection but I can not.

app = Flask(__name__)

mysql = MySQL()
@app.route('/')
def index():
    return "Hello, world!"
if __name__ == "__main__":
    # waitress.serve(app=app, host="0.0.0.0", port=5013)
    app.run(host="10.0.***", port=5013, debug=True, threaded=True)

I can access it from my machine only. but when I try to access from outside(i.e any phone or tablet) I cant reach it.

Answer 1

While this is possible, you should not use the Flask dev server in production. The Flask dev server is not designed to be particularly secure, stable, or efficient. See the docs on deploying for correct solutions.

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The --host option to flask run, or the host parameter to app.run(), controls what address the development server listens to. By default it runs on localhost, change it to flask run --host=0.0.0.0 (or app.run(host="0.0.0.0")) to run on all your machine's IP addresses.

0.0.0.0 is a special value that you can't use in the browser directly, you'll need to navigate to the actual IP address of the machine on the network. You may also need to adjust your firewall to allow external access to the port.

The Flask quickstart docs explain this in the "Externally Visible Server" section:

If you run the server you will notice that the server is only accessible from your own computer, not from any other in the network. This is the default because in debugging mode a user of the application can execute arbitrary Python code on your computer.

If you have the debugger disabled or trust the users on your network, you can make the server publicly available simply by adding --host=0.0.0.0 to the command line:

$ flask run --host=0.0.0.0

This tells your operating system to listen on all public IPs.