The days of .dev domains for testing code are over

While this is an interesting exploration of the history of the Internet, gTLDs, HSTS, and various other things, the story boils down to this: never make up an unregistered domain/TLD and assume it won't exist in the future; always use a reserved test domain/TLD from RFC 2606 (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2606) or the updated RFC 6761 (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6761): .test, .invalid, .example, or .localhost, depending on what semantics you need.

Re: The days of .dev domains for testing code are over

#6

Post by semperdark » Wed, Dec 06, 2017, 6:02 PM UTC

peterburkimsher wrote: post #4

tl;dr - Google bought the .dev gTLD, specified it for internal use, and pushed changes in Chrome to require HTTPS. Is that monopolistic behaviour?

Not monopolistic, but pretty obnoxious. I don't think that move made them many friends.

Re: The days of .dev domains for testing code are over

#7

Post by Kluny » Wed, Dec 06, 2017, 6:05 PM UTC

Is this a real problem? Usually when I need a testing domain I make a subdomain on an address I or my company owns. dev.kluny.com. Easy.

Re: The days of .dev domains for testing code are over

#8

Post by gruez » Wed, Dec 06, 2017, 6:05 PM UTC

JoshTriplett wrote: post #5

While this is an interesting exploration of the history of the Internet, gTLDs, HSTS, and various other things, the story boils down to this: never make up an unregistered domain/TLD and assume it won't exist in the future; always use a reserved test domain/TLD from RFC 2606 ( https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2606 ) or the updated RFC 6761 ( https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6761 ): .test, .invalid, .example, or .localhos…

to be fair, before icann introduced the gtld program, it was a fair assumption that there wouldn't be a .dev tld.

Re: The days of .dev domains for testing code are over

#9

Post by gruez » Wed, Dec 06, 2017, 6:07 PM UTC

drefanzor wrote: post #3

Google will be buying up the 127.x.x.x ip range before you know it /sarcasm

i'm sure that icann can be persuaded to reassign ownership of that subnet if google paid enough money. it's not like there's much people using anything other than 127.0.0.1, so why not sell 127.128.0.0/9 for some quick bucks? the only thing stopping them is the billions of legacy devices around that can't route to that address.

Re: The days of .dev domains for testing code are over

#10

Post by geofft » Wed, Dec 06, 2017, 6:07 PM UTC

> The other option is to change your .dev domain and never look back. But what domain could we migrate to? With the gTLD gold rush, is anything safe?

Just buy medium-devel.com or something and make it resolve to 127.0.0.1 in internal DNS. This gets you a couple of benefits:

- No one will ever take it from you

- You can configure it in external DNS if you'd like

- You can get a real, publicly-trusted SSL certificate for it, for free, because Let's Encrypt can resolve DNS challenges against it

(By the way, you want to get an SSL certificate for internal development, because of the policy - Chrome-initiated but now followed by the HTML standards folks in general - to require HTTPS for fancy new features like geolocation and service workers: https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/prefer-secur... If you don't have HTTPS of some sort, you can't test these features locally.)