Allowing external access to Visual Studio ASP.NET Web API project

While developing a Slack Slash Command for one of the products I work on, I discovered it is rather difficult to allow external access to a Web API in my Visual Studio debugging environment. Using numerous online resources, this is the steps it took to make it all work:

1. Setup a static IP for the router (or dynamic dns using something like noip.com)
   1. If not using dynamic DNS, create host record for the static IP (xxx.mydomain.com)
2. Allow traffic through the windows firewall for the designated port
3. Modified applicationhost.config (“.vs” sub-directory in the visual studio solution)
   1. Added bindings for the additional host names
4. Execute a command to allow external access to the port
   netsh http add urlacl url=http://<IP>:<PORT>/ user=everyone
5. Modified Web.config to not automatically re-direct to HTTPS (if the project is configured to force HTTPS, like mine was)

It would have been a lot easier, if Slack didn’t require using a URL with a host address, rather than a URL with a static IP.