How to enable external request in IIS Express?

How can I enable remote requests in IIS Express? Scott Guthrie wrote that is possible but he didn't say how.

There's a blog post up on the IIS team site now explaining how to enable remote connections on IIS Express. Here is the pertinent part of that post summarized:

On Vista and Win7, run the following command from an administrative prompt:

netsh http add urlacl url=http://vaidesg:8080/ user=everyone

For XP, first install Windows XP Service Pack 2 Support Tools. Then run the following command from an administrative prompt:

httpcfg set urlacl /u http://vaidesg1:8080/ /a D:(A;;GX;;;WD)

There are three changes you might need to make.

1. Tell IIS Express itself to bind to all ip addresses and hostnames. In your .config file. Typically:
   • VS 2015: $(solutionDir)\.vs\config\applicationhost.config
   • < VS 2015: %userprofile%\My Documents\IISExpress\config\applicationhost.config

Find your site's binding element, and add

    <binding protocol="http" bindingInformation="*:8080:*" />

2. Setup the bit of Windows called 'http.sys'. As an administrator, run the command:

    netsh http add urlacl url=http://*:8080/ user=everyone

Where everyone is a windows group. Use double quotes for groups with spaces like "Tout le monde".

3. Allow IIS Express through Windows firewall.

   Start / Windows Firewall with Advanced Security / Inbound Rules / New Rule...

   Program %ProgramFiles%\IIS Express\iisexpress.exe
   OR Port 8080 TCP

Now when you start iisexpress.exe you should see a message such as

Successfully registered URL "http://*:8080/" for site "hello world" application "/"

Nothing worked for me until I found iisexpress-proxy.

Open command prompt as administrator, then run

npm install -g iisexpress-proxy

then

iisexpress-proxy 51123 to 81

assuming your Visual Studio project opens on localhost:51123 and you want to access on external IP address x.x.x.x:81

Edit: I am currently using ngrok

I remember running into the same problems while trying this workflow a few months ago.

Which is why I wrote a simple proxy utility specifically for this kind of scenario: https://github.com/icflorescu/iisexpress-proxy.

Using the IIS Express Proxy, it all becomes quite simple – no need to “netsh http add urlacl url=vaidesg:8080/ user=everyone” or to mess up with your “applicationhost.config”.

Just issue this in command prompt:

iisexpress-proxy 8080 to 3000

…and then you can point your remote devices to http://vaidesg:3000.

Most of the times simpler IS better.