How do I access localhost from another pc on the network?

[Paithar]

Here's the situation. At home I am setting up a small network that consists of two desktop pc's and one laptop. The laptop connects wirelessly to the network. The laptop also is running PHP, MySQL, and Apache.

On the laptop is a copy of my companies website. They let me put a copy on my laptop (to include the whole MySQL database and all php web pages) so that I could play around with things and test any changes I'm supposed to make before I upload to their server.

Well, I was wondering if there was any way that I could access the laptop's localhost setup from either of the two desktop pc's on my home network? Is it simply a matter of making sure that the folders for all of that info is shared on the laptop and then finding out it's IP address on my network and using that IP in a browser or is there more to it?

The reason I want to do this is because when I'm at home we have several people that like to use the computers all at the same time. My wife being one of these people likes to use the laptop. So if she's using the laptop and I want to do some programming and testing I'm out of luck unless I can somehow connect to the laptop. I figure this might be easier than actually backing up the whole website/database again and reinstalling everything on both of the other two pc's.

I'm not sure I explained what I want to do correctly so if you need more info just let me know.

 

[cowgod]

just make sure your apache configuration either has a virtual host or main servername with the ip of your laptop machine set. then you should be able to access the site from any computer on your network by putting the ip in the browser location (ie. http://1.1.1.1).

 

[BGM]

http://laptopmachinename


should do the trick, if not use the IP as above^

 

[fluxion]

and share the directory[ies] containing the documents you'll need access to you can modify source code and whatnot