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The days of .dev domains for testing code are over

medium.engineering

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

#11

Post by jerf »

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?

"Is that monopolistic behaviour?"

No. Acquiring the TLD has nothing to do with any monopoly, so it's just a browser decision made by Chrome, and it isn't locking anybody out of any markets.

It's also technically not even a change to the status quo. Beforehand, you weren't supposed to be using .dev like that. As the article says, you should have been using .test or .invalid. After Google's actions, you still shouldn't have been using .dev and should have been using .test or .invalid. You can't hear my tone, but I don't mean that in the imperative or angry; we've pretty much all screwed that up at some point. But a screw-up it was.

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

#12

Post by hobofan »

geofft wrote: post #10

> 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 f…

- You can set up a service on the domain that logs the incoming requests on the domain, which can help you pinpoint misconfigured parts of your infrastructure

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

#14

Post by cls59 »

gruez wrote: post #8
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.

But also, the folks at medium made that assumption long after RFC 2606 had established a "right answer" for which tld to use when testing.

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

#15

Post by paulgb »

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?

Thanks for the tl;dr, but why buy a tld for internal use only? Just so nobody else would? (Maybe it's in TFA; I'll admit I didn't read it)

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

#16

Post by TheAceOfHearts »

I absolutely hate this gTLD crap. The fact that companies can pick up any TLD on the global namespace is absurd. Even worse, the internet community never had a chance to object to these sales.

Something that pisses me off even more is that a few months back there was an IETF draft to specify the .home TLD to only resolve local network requests. It seemed pretty reasonable, but there was pushback and it was changed to home.arpa, since the .arpa TLD is already restricted. So big companies can pick up any TLD they want, but regular users will forever be forced to type in extra characters.

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

#17

Post by ChrisSD »

gruez wrote: post #8
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.

To be honest, programmers should be more aware than most that the spec will change and previously "fair" assumptions won't hold.

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

#18

Post by NSAID »

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…

Yeah, fake domain names and TLDs are an issue with Microsoft sysadmins in regards to .local. I aggressively move environments away from using anything half-baked like ".dev.", and while some people like ".local", I'm not a fan. Ignore the spec at your own peril.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.local#Microsoft_recommendatio...

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