I know this is a super basic question but I've read about 100 webpages and tutorials and haven't been able to figure things out.
So, I've bought a domain name and connected to my external ip address. The problem is, that just directs to my dd-wrt router home page. Not super helpful. I have nginx set up on my ubuntu machine and that serves things locally just fine. I have added to /etc/hosts the following
192.0.2.37 mywebsite.example
192.0.2.37 www.mywebsite.example
where 192.0.2.37
is my external IP address.
How do I convince my router to let the connection through for my computer to serve?
Edit
The answers below are both helpful but I should have mentioned that I had already set up port forwarding. Perhaps this is a problem with where I bought my domain and have not yet set that up properly? It does point to my external ip but doesn't appear to be making any requests from a particular address/host within the network
http://example.com:8080/index.html
– Stephen Ostermiller♦ Jul 8 '19 at 18:30