How to get a physical device talking to your local Laravel site — and to the Ionic/Capacitor app that consumes it — without a public tunnel, without a LAN IP, and without TLS warnings.

You have a Laravel API running beautifully under Herd at https://myapp.test . You have a mobile app that talks to it. You plug in a phone, launch the app, and every request fails.

This is the moment a lot of Laravel developers first discover that their local development environment is, from the phone's point of view, completely invisible.

This article walks through fixing that with Tailscale. Along the way we'll hit one failure that is genuinely hard to diagnose — the site keeps working perfectly in your Mac's browser while returning 404 to every request from the phone — and understanding why is most of the value here.

Scope: this covers a physical device reaching a Herd site over Tailscale. Emulators and simulators have different networking models and aren't covered.…