Note: browsers also give you a Secure Context for .localhost domains.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Secure...

So you don't need self signed certs for HTTPS on local if you want to, for example, have a backend API and a frontend SPA running at the same time talking to eachother on your machine (authentication for example requires a secure context if doing OAuth2).

You might check out .internal instead which was recently approved [1] for local use.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.internal

Chrome and i think Firefox resolve all <name>.localhost domains to localhost per default, so you don't have to add them to the hosts file. I setup a docker proxy on port 80 that resolves all requests from <containername>.localhost to the first exposed port of that container (in order of appearing in the docker compose file) automatically which makes everything smooth without manual steps for docker compose based setups.

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

This nginx local dev config snippet is one-and-done:

  # Proxy to a backend server based on the hostname.
  if (-d vhosts/$host) {
    proxy_pass http://unix:vhosts/$host/server.sock;
    break;
  }

Your local dev servers must listen on a unix domain socket, and you must drop a symlink to them at eg /var/lib/nginx/vhosts/inclouds.localhost/server.sock.

Not a single command, and you still have to add hostname resolution. But you don't have to programmatically edit config files or restart the proxy to stand up a new dev server!