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.localhost Domains

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Re: .localhost Domains

#71

Post by oulipo »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #50

Any subdomain of .localhost works out-of-the-box on Linux, OpenBSD and plenty of other platforms. Of note, it doesn't work on macOS. I recall having delivered a coding assignment for a job interview long ago, and the reviewer said it didn't work for them, although the code all seemed correct to them. It turned out on macOS, you need to explicitly add any subdomains of .localhost to /etc/hosts. I'm still surprised by…

Just did that on my mac and it seems to work?

    $ ping hello.localhost
    PING hello.localhost (127.0.0.1): 56 data bytes
    64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=0.057 ms
    64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.162 ms

Re: .localhost Domains

#72

Post by 1wheel »

jeroenhd wrote: post #49
Pxtl wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, if I had my druthers there would be a standardized exception for .local domains that self-signed HTTPS certs would be accepted without known roots. It's insane how there's no good workflow for HTTPS on LAN-only services.

Technically speaking you could use DANE with mDNS. Nobody does it, browser don't implemented it, but you can follow the spec if you'd like. Practically speaking, HTTPS on LAN is essentially useless, so I don't see the benefits. If anything, the current situation allows the user to apply TOFU to local devices by adding their unsigned certs to the trust store.

Browsers won't use http2 unless https is on — chrome only allows six concurrent requests to the same domain if you're not using https!

Re: .localhost Domains

#73

Post by oulipo »

radel wrote: post #17

I think you don't really need the /etc/hosts entry, I use this since google started using .dev domains and switched to using .localhost for everything local. Never needed the entry

and you're still setting up a proxy for the port forwarding?

Re: .localhost Domains

#74

Post by octagons »

Against much well-informed advice, I use a vanity domain for my internal network at home. Through a combination Smallstep CA, CoreDNS, and Traefik, any services I host in my Docker Swarm cluster automatically are immediately issued a signed SSL certificate, load-balanced, and resolvable. Traefik also allows me to configure authentication for any services that I may not wish to expose without such.

That said, I do recommend the use of the internal. zone for any such setup, as others have commented. This article provides some good reasons why (at least for .local) you should aim to use a standards-compliant internal zone: https://community.veeam.com/blogs-and-podcasts-57/why-using-...

Re: .localhost Domains

#75

Post by CodesInChaos »

peterldowns wrote: post #68

If you’re interested in doing local web development with “real” domain names, valid ssl certs, etc, you may enjoy my project Localias. It’s built on top of Caddy and has a nice CLI and config file format that you can commit to your team’s shared repo. It also has some nice features like making .local domain aliases available to any other device on your network, so you can more easily do mobile device testing on a rea…

How do valid certs for localhost work? Does that require installing an unconstraint root certificate to sign the dev certs? Or is there a less risky way (name constraints?)

Re: .localhost Domains

#77

Post by oulipo »

cyral wrote: post #65
vlod wrote: post #30

Anyone care to shed why myapp.localhost:3000 (for the webapp I'm developing) is something that's useful for me rather than localhost:3000 ? EDIT: on linux and don't use launchd, so I'd still the port number

Note the use of the Caddy webserver (you could also use nginx or whatever), which proxies to the port, so it's just myapp.localhost. I like this because it mirrors our production site. We can have subdomain.myapp.localhost and subdomain.myapp.com so links and everything work properly in both environments (assuming you have an env variable for the base domain)

Could there be a way to setup the Caddy server dynamically using eg direnv so that it's only launched when I'm in my dev folder?

Re: .localhost Domains

#78

Post by oulipo »

donatj wrote: post #39

We add a real actual DNS record for the local. subdomain pointing to 127.0.0.1 It works really well and means no setup on our developers machines

Can you expand on this? you redirect *.local.example.com to 127.0.0.1, and then how do you setup the local machine so that eg myservice.local.example.com hits the correct port? I guess you still need a proxy somewhere? or you specify eg myservice.local.example.com:3000 ?

Re: .localhost Domains

#79

Post by sangeeth96 »

CodesInChaos wrote: post #75
peterldowns wrote: post #68

If you’re interested in doing local web development with “real” domain names, valid ssl certs, etc, you may enjoy my project Localias. It’s built on top of Caddy and has a nice CLI and config file format that you can commit to your team’s shared repo. It also has some nice features like making .local domain aliases available to any other device on your network, so you can more easily do mobile device testing on a rea…

How do valid certs for localhost work? Does that require installing an unconstraint root certificate to sign the dev certs? Or is there a less risky way (name constraints?)

It's mentioned in the README:

  - If Caddy has not already generated a local root certificate:
     - Generate a local root certificate to sign TLS certificates
     - Install the local root certificate to the system's trust stores, and the Firefox certificate store if it exists and an be accessed.
So yes. I had written about how I do this directly with Caddy over here: https://automagic.blog/posts/custom-domains-with-https-for-y...

Re: .localhost Domains

#80

Post by Shywim »

oulipo wrote: post #71
WhyNotHugo wrote: post #50

Any subdomain of .localhost works out-of-the-box on Linux, OpenBSD and plenty of other platforms. Of note, it doesn't work on macOS. I recall having delivered a coding assignment for a job interview long ago, and the reviewer said it didn't work for them, although the code all seemed correct to them. It turned out on macOS, you need to explicitly add any subdomains of .localhost to /etc/hosts. I'm still surprised by…

Just did that on my mac and it seems to work? $ ping hello.localhost PING hello.localhost (127.0.0.1): 56 data bytes 64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=0.057 ms 64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.162 ms

Not for me, MacOS 15.4:

    $ ping hello.localhost
    ping: cannot resolve hello.localhost: Unknown host
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