Has anyone ever tried to use an iPhone as web server?

Question

Yeah, it makes no sense to use an iPhone as web server, although the hardware could be used in some interesting ways if this would be possible. You could, for example, set up the iPhone to send a phonecall or SMS with pre-recorded message to someone who, for example, send his phonenumber through it's web interface to be included in it's address book.

Again, it's not very useful, but it would be cool to be able to communicate with an iPhone-based web server. Who knows? Maybe someone does come up with a practical purpose for this!

Answer 1

Yes, this has been done. Here is some articles about one of the ways it has been done:

• The iPhone Becomes a Web Server

• iPhone ‘Personal Data Center’ Debuts in US

And this is the product:

http://serversman.com/index_en.jsp

Answer 2

Although it is fixed function and not exactly what your looking for (but does show the concept in action), the HanDBase iPhone application includes a web server -- that's how you upload and download databases, by pointing your host web browser at the iPhone.

Answer 3

Yes, I set it up on my iPhone to serve up voicemails. It was a pain getting voicemail through WinSCP, so I made a small web interface that would let me download them by going to myiphone.local. I can also get my photos from there as well.

I used lighttpd as the webserver (you can get that from cydia), sqllite, and php to serve the pages.

The bad thing is that it only works when the iphone is on. Once its off, you can't access it anymore.

There is also a dynamicDNS app called iDNS you can use to set a domain name for your iPhone.

Answer 4

Developers can easily add web server functionality to their iOS apps using the CocoaHTTPServer library. Apps that implement it often use it to allow users to transfer data between their phones and any computer with a browser that's on the same WiFi network.