In this lesson, we're going to talk about what is localhost. Localhost can be defined as the IP address associated with your machine. Now this is a very specific definition in that your computer has several IPs associated with it. There is an IP address that the internet sees. There is an IP address that your local network sees. And by local network, you could be sitting at home, but if you have a wireless connection and that wireless connection connects to your smartphone or to your television or even a game system that has its own network address associated with inside your house. There is also an IP that your machine sees when it's accessing itself. This is the localhost. The localhost has a default value. That value is 127.0.0.1. You can also reach localhost by taping that value in your web browser. So let's take a moment to examine what we have on our computer. Now before we do this, my machine setup is very different than quite a few others. You will see a great many different IP addresses, network cards, a lot of stuff that maybe yours doesn't have, but don't let it confuse you. Because of the nature of my employment, it is critical I have access to many networks. So here we go. What you want to do is go to the search bar in your Windows environment and you're going to type in CMD and that brings up the command prompt window. Now this might be a place that you may never have looked at before. So don't be afraid. There's no mouse interaction. It's called a CLI or a command line interface. And what we're going to do is we're going to take a look at all of the IP addresses associated with, in this case, my machine and the networks I'm connected with. So you can follow along and do this, but you will see different things. So I'm going to type IP config and I'm going to put a space and a forward slash and type all. Now what it's going to show me when I hit enter is every IP address and where everything is located. So let's take a quick look at mine here. So this is my basic IP configuration. It's a hybrid configuration. And then it's followed by different adapters. So I have a, actually I have two ethernet adapters or network cards in my machine and it shows that they're disconnected because I use Wi-Fi to access the networks I need to access. I also have a ethernet adapter associated with a virtual environment that I use for my day to day job. Then I have a couple of wireless LAN adapters. So I want access to a couple of wireless networks. So I have some that I can turn on and off. But the one we want to look at, there's my other ethernet card. The one we want to look at is this one, the wireless LAN adapter for Wi-Fi. This is my main home network, how I get out to the internet and that sort of thing. So this is all the information of associated with my network connection. But the one I want to point out is the IP for address and it's 192.168.1.6. This is the IP address for my main in-home network. Then I also have and everyone who has Bluetooth has an ethernet connection based on the Bluetooth connectivity. But the one we're interested in is the local host. So we're going to use a different tool to determine if it's working, where it is, what it is. So I'm going to use what's called ping. And what pinging is, is sending a piece of data across the network. And it's actually in this case, going to loop around and come back to my machine. Just remember local host is associated with the machine you're talking with matching the machine you're talking to. So I'm going to type in ping and local host. And there's the ping. It sends out a piece of data and then relates back how long that information took. Well, of course, since I'm not going anywhere, they're going to take less than one millisecond. But if I want to check my local host because this is something we are going to do, I'm going to ping the address that I know local host is, which is 127.0.0.1. And you'll see that it's also they're all the same. What I mean by all the same is the pinging times are still all less than one millisecond. What this tells me is that I can set up specific software on my machine to work on complete interactivity on a website, which is what we're going to be doing next. In our next lesson, we are going to set up WAMP. See you then.
