mjhjmtu

I'm running this project for creating access points which is built on top of hostapd.

Running this works as expected, my ethernet connection is available as wifi:

sudo create_ap wlan0 eth0 wifiname

I was hoping that port 80 on my host machine would automatically be exposed to the client but it isn't.

How can I create a hostapd hotspot that exposes port 80? I'm thinking I might need to use iptables or dnsmasq but I'm not sure.

I'm using the project linked as a starting point but my main goal is to broadcast a port over a wifi-hot spot.

Update: I found that by default the host is available at IP 192.168.12.1. I'm now looking for a way to forward all (or at minimum localhost) traffic on the hotspot to this IP.

But I still need to be able to resolve other domains on the host itself.

You cannot do that via hostapd because port 80 is at Layer4 of ISO/OSI stack, APs work at Layer2. So you need to identify your IP connected via WIFI and work with IPTABLES for that IP

I was able to get the behavior I wanted using dnsmasq. Originally I was confused because I was adding the following to the default dnsmasq.conf location:

address=/#/192.168.12.1

It should forward all traffic to the IP 192.168.12.1 but I found it wasn't working.

Later on while running top with the program running I found that create_ap had called dnsmasq but with a custom dnsmasq.conf in a /tmp/ folder.

Reading through the source I found this snippet:

 MTU=$(get_mtu $INTERNET_IFACE)
 [[ -n "$MTU" ]] && echo "dhcp-option-force=option:mtu,$MTU" >> $CONFDIR/dnsmasq.conf
 [[ $ETC_HOSTS -eq 0 ]] && echo no-hosts >> $CONFDIR/dnsmasq.conf
 [[ -n "$ADDN_HOSTS" ]] && echo "addn-hosts=$ADDN_HOSTS" >> $CONFDIR/dnsmasq.conf
 if [[ "$SHARE_METHOD" == "none" && "$REDIRECT_TO_LOCALHOST" == "1" ]]; then
 cat << EOF >> $CONFDIR/dnsmasq.conf
address=/#/$GATEWAY

Inside that statement I added the following line to add my configuration to the temporary dnsmasq file:

echo "address=/#/$GATEWAY" >> $CONFDIR/dnsmasq.conf

After adding that any http address on the AP was forwarding to 192.168.12.1 the browser automatically assumes port 80 when one isn't provided so that became a non-issue.