How to do the port forwarding from one ip to another ip in same network?

These rules should work, assuming that iptables is running on server 192.168.12.87 :

#!/bin/sh

echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward

iptables -F
iptables -t nat -F
iptables -X

iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp --dport 80 -j DNAT --to-destination 192.168.12.77:80
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -p tcp -d 192.168.12.77 --dport 80 -j SNAT --to-source 192.168.12.87

You have to DNAT incoming traffic on port 80, but you will also need to SNAT the traffic back.

---

Alternative (and best approach IMHO) :

Depending on what your Web Server is (Apache, NGinx) you should consider an HTTP Proxy on your front-end server (192.168.12.87) :

• mod_proxy (Apache)

• proxy_pass (NGinx)