Barrier Between The Internet And Your Home Network
Now, the last step! You've got to open your home network to let traffic in from the World Wide Web, so it can get to your server. As of right now, even if your server were up and running and your Dynamic Domain Name Server or DNS service were configured, once someone's request got to your home network, your router wouldn't let it in the door. In other situations, this firewall is necessary to keep your devices safe from threats roaming the web. So, you need to open a "port" on your router to let this special traffic in. Specifically, you need to tell your router to send all traffic coming in on port 80 straight to your server. You can think of a port as a doorway. There are many ports on your router, but we're only concerned with port 80 because that's the port that http requests come through (http is the protocol your server uses to serve webpages - it's like a language that computers can speak to each other). Once your router knows to do this, your server will be accessible from outside your home network.
So to do this, do a Google search for "port forwarding on the <name and model of your router>". Make sure you have the owner of the router's permission before you forward port 80 to your server.
In order to forward traffic to your server, you'll need to know its local IP address. This is another, different IP address that only exists on your Wi-Fi network, assigned to your computer by the router. Local IP addresses are usually shorter than regular IP addresses, for example my computer's is 10.0.1.14 and my phone's is 10.0.1.5. You can learn how to find your local IP by searching "how to find local IP on <your server's operating system>". Once you know it, you can tell your router to send port 80 traffic to your local IP address.
