As has been pointed out already, unless you are specifically forwarding http traffic from your router to your machine, your locally hosted stuff will only be available to you and the other computers on your local network.
To answer your question on restricting access to your webserver to just your machine. You can do this a couple of ways.
Remember, anytime you change apache configurations, you need to restart apache for those changes to take effect.
Method 1
If you want to limit everything on your local webserver to just your local machine, edit the file "/etc/apache2/httpd.conf". At approx line 195 you'll find a configuration block that looks similar to:
<Directory "/Library/WebServer/Documents">
#
# Possible values for the Options directive are "None", "All",
# or any combination of:
# Indexes Includes FollowSymLinks SymLinksifOwnerMatch ExecCGI MultiViews
#
# Note that "MultiViews" must be named *explicitly* --- "Options All"
# doesn't give it to you.
#
# The Options directive is both complicated and important. Please see
# http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/core.html#options
# for more information.
#
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
#
# AllowOverride controls what directives may be placed in .htaccess files.
# It can be "All", "None", or any combination of the keywords:
# Options FileInfo AuthConfig Limit
#
AllowOverride None
#
# Controls who can get stuff from this server.
#
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>
You are going to want to comment out the bottom two lines of that block and add in new rules
Deny from all
and
Allow from 127.0.0.1
that block should now look like:
<Directory "/Library/WebServer/Documents">
#
# Possible values for the Options directive are "None", "All",
# or any combination of:
# Indexes Includes FollowSymLinks SymLinksifOwnerMatch ExecCGI MultiViews
#
# Note that "MultiViews" must be named *explicitly* --- "Options All"
# doesn't give it to you.
#
# The Options directive is both complicated and important. Please see
# http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/core.html#options
# for more information.
#
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
#
# AllowOverride controls what directives may be placed in .htaccess files.
# It can be "All", "None", or any combination of the keywords:
# Options FileInfo AuthConfig Limit
#
AllowOverride None
#
# Controls who can get stuff from this server.
#
#Order allow,deny
#Allow from all
Deny from all
Allow from 127.0.0.1
</Directory>
Method 2
You can also use .htaccess files to limit who has access to a directory. In order for .htaccess files to work you first need to enable them. Open the same file I referenced in method 1 (/etc/apache2/httpd.conf) and go to the same configuration block I mentioned before (at approx line 195). You'll need to change (at approx line 215):
AllowOverride None
to
AllowOverride All
Once you have done that you can create a file called .htaccess in any folder on your web server with the following information:
Deny from all
Allow from 127.0.0.1
That will prevent anyone besides your local machine from accessing the contents of that folder or any of it's subfolders.
Conclusion
Method 1 has the benefit of not having to worry about accidentally deleting .htaccess files or worrying about multiple configurations. Method 2 makes it very simple to only restrict access to certain directories of your webserver.
Also note that the .htaccess file must include that period at the beginning of the file name (it's .htaccess not htaccess) and that when you want to view your local webserver you have to do so by going to http://localhost (you can't use [your computer name].local).
A few things:
Apache built into OS X runs on port 80. If XAMPP couldn't start the web server erroring because port 8000 is in use, something is listening on that port already. You did one of the right things in reconfiguring XAMPP's Apache port, the other would be to find what's running on 8000 :).
You're using the "Bonjour" name of your server, in theory. The mysite.local name. But if it's taking more than a second to resolve, then it is obviously browsing out to the internet in order to resolve the name to an address and come back inside.
If you know how, you can take the time to investigate your Bonjour settings. If you have Wide-Area Bonjour Browsing configured, but the server on the other end is not (or is no longer), these lookup delays are not completely impractical.
The quickest fix to this problem would just be to use localhost:8080 instead of mysite.local:8080, the longer one would be to trace where exactly your DNS lookup is heading too, and determining why a multi-second lookup is occurring.
Best Answer
Run this command:
That should start your standard apache server software as well as edit the system startup files to cause it to start at boot. Replace start with stop to reverse that change. Your grep shows that httpd is not actually running and there's just the grep process active. You may need to look at the logs if after asking apachectl to start things up, the httpd process doesn't stay running (or even start in the first place).