How to access Electrum remotely via the rest api?

I am able to execute calls on the server from the server. When I say calls, I mean like this. I.e. I can get the latest addresses doing something like this:

$ch = curl_init();

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "http://127.0.0.1:7777");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, "{"id":"curltext","method":"listaddresses"}");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);

$headers = array();
$headers[] = "Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded";
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $headers);

$result = curl_exec($ch);
if (curl_errno($ch)) {
    echo 'Error:' . curl_error($ch);
}
curl_close ($ch);
print '<pre>';
print_r($result);

The problem is, I don’t want to have to execute this on the server. I was hoping there would be a secure way to execute this remotely.

Can someone please tell me if this is possible? I tried opening port 7777, but still can’t access it. Is it perhaps on purpose? As I can imagine this being a security problem.

Thanks!