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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

#21

Post by borkabrak »

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…

This.. seems to resolve every issue I might have otherwise had with the story, including the impulse to yell at Google about it, but the author himself makes a fair case for not doing that.

It turns out that part of the way the internet is declared to work includes reserved TLDs to be used for testing. So the burden of responsibility for avoiding a situation such as the article describes lies on the developer to use one of those reserved TLDs instead of ".dev", which anyone could (and now, has) come to control.

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

#22

Post by mrmondo »

We still have a huge number of the dev environments running on .dev, needless to say we were pretty pissed off when Google were able to buy the TLD to use as they wish. Anyway, not much we can do about it now other than start the process of setting up a new subdomain and reconfiguring all our CI/CD, Apps, Docs etc... I know we should have done it ages ago, there’s a ticket there for it... but resourcing.... sigh

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

#24

Post by vertex-four »

paulgb wrote: post #15
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)

To ensure that nobody else does. Google uses .dev pervasively for projects - if someone were to buy .dev and sell domains in it on the global DNS infrastructure, then myfancynewproject.dev would resolve to something entirely different from within Google than from outside it.

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

#26

Post by AnkhMorporkian »

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…

This might seem prophetic or cocky, but I've used a random b64 TLD for years that I expand with a macro. After we expanded past countries on the TLDs, I just figured that any short (or even sensible) TLD would eventually be taken, and I didn't want that to break any of my tests that had hardcoded domains (as rare as those are.)

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

#28

Post by borkabrak »

koliber wrote: post #19

The article outlines two options. There is a third. Lobby google through petitions and collective developer action to surrender their .dev TLD and create an RFC that makes it reserved for developer used, similarly to .example and .test.

I'm not sure a strong case can be made that Google should be obliged to do that. There already exist TLD suffixes reserved for testing. ".dev" just isn't one of them.

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

#29

Post by grawprog »

As much as I agree with not using a public TLD as a dev environment, why the fuck was google allowed to register and privately secure not one but several domains for their own private use? Fuck them. That shouldn't have been allowed, especially for a TLD that's well known to be heavily used.

I really dislike allowing domains to be used in such a way. It seems extremely short sighted.

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

#30

Post by Kalium »

grawprog wrote: post #29

As much as I agree with not using a public TLD as a dev environment, why the fuck was google allowed to register and privately secure not one but several domains for their own private use? Fuck them. That shouldn't have been allowed, especially for a TLD that's well known to be heavily used. I really dislike allowing domains to be used in such a way. It seems extremely short sighted.

Anyone is allowed to buy any gTLD for any use. As a result, Google was allowed to buy .dev. They then chose to use it for internal use only.

Unfortunately, the time to oppose this was long ago when gTLDs were first being debated...

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