Connecting to a locally Running app with hotwire native

title: Connecting to a locally-running app with Hotwire Native category: TIL –

I’ve just started a new Hotwire Native application. The Getting Started docs for Android use a deployed domain name, so while the demo app worked just fine, I had a bit of trouble figuring out how to connect to my locally-running web app from an Android emulator. In my case, it was a Rails app, but any other web framework would also have this problem.

There were two useful things I found:

1. Android emulators make your computer available at 10.0.2.2. This means that if you run your web app on port 3000, you can connect in a browser at http://10.0.2.2:3000. Neat!
2. If you are connecting to insecure origins, you need to flag this in your AndroidManifest.xml - specifically, you need to add android:usesCleartextTraffic="true" to the <application> tag.

With this configuration in place, I was able to set up Hotwire Native to connect in debug builds to my locally-running web applicaiton, and I was off!