Local-tld NPM | npm.io

Local TLD

Local TLD maintains a local development top level domain that you can hook various projects into.

If you know pow, this is pow without the Rack part.

Mac OS X only, for the time being. Cross platform support desired, if you can contribute it! :)

Er what?

Here’s an example. What if you maintained two web projects A and B and have a local setup of both, and you’d like to work on the both at the same time, or switch easily, and you don’t want to mess with things like http://localhost:8888 because that is just annoying and ugly.

What if you could have these two nice addresses:

http://myfancyprojectA.dev
http://thatotherprojectB.dev

Yes, you can do that by messing with /etc/hosts, but it ain’t pretty, and you have to do it for every new project and it is ugly.

Setup

$ npm -g install local-tld
  # or for now git clone $thisrepo
$ $EDITOR ~/.local-tld.json
{
  "8000": {
    "name": "myfancyprojectA"
  },
  "8001": {
    "name": "thatotherprojectB"
  }
}

Dat it. /.local-tld.json maps the a subdomain to a TCP port. So if you have a httpd running on localhost:8000 you can now reach it by going to http://myfancyprojectA.dev.

I want my app to register itself with local-tld!

See https://github.com/hoodiehq/local-tld-lib

Ok cool, how does it work?

This uses a cool dynamic DNS system that is built into Mac OS X. Local TLD runs a minimal DNS lookup server that does the address translation magic.

I want subdomains!

Easy. Just make your configuration look like this:

{
  "8000": {
    "name": "myfancyprojectA",
    "aliases": ["subdomain1", "subdomain2"]
  }
}

Now, you should be able to reach localhost:8000 from http://myfancyprojectA.dev, http://subdomain1.myfancyprojectA.dev, and http://subdomain2.myfancyprojectA.dev!