[HELP] Can it forward webservers from ORBSTACK, like nginx or caddy?

[piyushdongre-dot-com]

Hi, came across this from orbstack discussion. I want to simply access my nginx server ( hosted on Ubuntu VM inside orbstack), from other devices on LAN.

[lpbas]

Beacon is not a port forwarder or HTTP proxy, so it won't directly expose an nginx server from an OrbStack VM.

It can only re-broadcast Bonjour/mDNS services that already exist and are visible to the Mac. So if your VM advertises the web server as _http._tcp or _https._tcp via Avahi/mDNS, Beacon can make that Bonjour service visible on the LAN. But if the goal is simply opening http://... from another device, OrbStack's own "Expose ports to LAN" setting is the right path.

A possible future Beacon feature could be "advertise this Mac port as a Bonjour web service", but even that would only publish discovery metadata; the port still needs to already be reachable through OrbStack/macOS.

But you should be able to access your containers form other devices on the LAN already (I have at least 10 containers running in OrbStack which host services that I can access using my Mac's IP and service port) no need for the Beacon app. The issue with OrbStack on my side was that mDNS services could not be discovered by other LAN devices (like HomeAssistant HomeKit bridges)