.localhost Domains

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 real phone. It also syncs your /etc/hosts so you never need to edit it manually.

Check it out and let me know what you think! (Free, MIT-licensed, single-binary install)

Basically, it wraps up the instructions in this blogpost and makes everything easy for you and your team.

https://github.com/peterldowns/localias

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...