In this article, I’d like to show how to set up a fake domain for local development.

Warning! The following is not suitable for production!

Fake domain setup

1.Add alias into /etc/hosts file. E.g. add line 127.0.0.1 mydomain.test.

2.Don’t use a domain ending with '.dev', if you don’t have the HTTPS certificates for that domain! Chrome and Firefox automatically redirects '.dev' domains to the secured HTTPS connection

3.Edit /etc/nsswitch.conf and make sure, that hosts param has files first, e.g. hosts: files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns. It means, that the domain names resolver will look at files (/etc/hosts file) first, and then tries other services (DB lookup, DNS lookup).

Now run your dev server and test connection, not by 127.0.0.1:<port>, but by mydomain.test:<port>

Setup port 80

Now let’s try to access dev server on port 80. I’ll use Nginx (sudo apt install nginx) for that, but Apache or Caddy also ok - any server with reverse proxy support. Add mydomain.conf file into /etc/nginx/conf.d with following minimal content:

server {
    listen       80;
    server_name  www.mydomain.test mydomain.test;
    location / {
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8000;  # reverse proxy to your dev server
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
    }
}

Restart Nginx and you may access the dev server by http://mydomain.test. Congratulations!

Setup HTTPS

Here’s a little bit of theory: HTTPS is a secure HTTP connection - a data exchange between the client and the server is encrypted, not plain text, so no one who doesn’t have the encryption keys can understand what this data is. In most cases, there’s a third part in communication - Certificates Authority (CA), who both the client and server trust. CA provides public keys, known as Root Certificates, which are usually installed system-wide on Operation System. Valid root certificate allows establishing an HTTPS connection.

When you get a certificate for a domain, you need to “prove” that it belongs to you. With localhost you can’t do the same, since no one belongs to localhost, so you need to create a self-signed certificate, to make your OS trust your CA.

Steps to setup HTTPS:

• generate self-signed root certificates
• create signed leaf certificates
• install the root certificate on your browser (or system-wide)

You can run openssl commands to generate certificates as described in this article:

openssl req -x509 -out localhost.crt -keyout localhost.key \
  -newkey rsa:2048 -nodes -sha256 \
  -subj '/CN=localhost' -extensions EXT -config <( \
   printf "[dn]\nCN=localhost\n[req]\ndistinguished_name = dn\n[EXT]\nsubjectAltName=DNS:localhost\nkeyUsage=digitalSignature\nextendedKeyUsage=serverAuth")

There’s an easy-to-use tool named miniCA, which generates all necessary certificates:

minica --domains mydomain.test

And in my next article, I’ll show how to use another tool, Pebble to generate certificates.

Setup Nginx to use that certificates

Certbot installed all keys/certificates into /etc/letsencrypt/live/mydomain.test directory. Finally, let’s setup https:

server {
    listen       443 ssl;
    server_name  www.mydomain.test mydomain.test;
    ssl_protocols TLSv1 TLSv1.1 TLSv1.2;
    ssl_certificate "/etc/letsencrypt/live/mydomain.test/fullchain.pem";
    ssl_certificate_key "/etc/letsencrypt/live/mydomain.test/privkey.pem";
    ssl_session_cache shared:SSL:1m;
    ssl_session_timeout  10m;
    ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on;
    ssl_ciphers HIGH:!aNULL:!MD5;

    location / {
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8000;
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
    }
}