127.0.0.1:5000 ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED from react app but curl and browser works

Hi there @fabdarice,

There are a couple of solutions that I could suggest:

• Use Nginx reverse proxy to proxy

What you could do is set up Nginx as a reverse proxy and proxy the traffic from your_public_ip/api to http://localhost:5000/, that way the 5000 port would not have to be exposed externally.

Then you will need to configure your React app so it connects to your_public_ip/api instead of `http://localhost:5000/.

• Change your React app to connect to http://your_public_ip:5000 instead of http://127.0.0.1:5000/

It sounds like that in your React app you’ve specified your Flask URL as http://127.0.0.1:5000/, so when you access the React app via your browser, it tries to connect to port 5000 on your PC rather than the server IP address.

To fix that without Nginx proxy, you need to change the reference to your Flask app in your React app so that it points to http://your_public_ip:5000 instead of http://127.0.0.1:5000/. And as you mentioned make sure that Flask is binding on 0.0.0.0 rather than localhost.

Also, can you try running the following command to make sure that both services are listening as expected on the correct ports:

sudo netstat -plant

Let me know how it goes! Regards, Bobby