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0 pointscodetrotter2y ago0 comments

Test is best used in temporary setups that you use for testing things.

Example is best used in documentation only.

Invalid is weird and confusing.

Localhost as a TLD should still be on the machine itself. Keeping in mind that 127.0.0.1 is not the only loopback address at your disposal – you have the whole /8. You could bind different services on different loopback ip addresses and then assign host names in the .localhost tld to those.

So for example you could run different Wordpress instances locally on your machine on ips 127.87.80.2, 127.87.80.3, and 127.87.80.4, so that each can run on port 80 without colliding with one another, and without resorting to having non-80/non-443 ports.

Then have corresponding entries in /etc/hosts

127.87.80.2 dogblog.localhost

127.87.80.3 cooking.localhost

127.87.80.4 travel.localhost

And use those domains to access each of those from your browser. Then you don’t even need to keep all services behind the same Nginx instance for example, as you otherwise would do if you had different domain names but was using 127.0.0.1 and port 80 for all of them.

Whereas having the localhost tld refer to hosts elsewhere on a physical network.. that’s about equally as weird and confusing as “invalid”.

0 comments

pwdisswordfishc2y ago

> Keeping in mind that 127.0.0.1 is not the only loopback address at your disposal – you have the whole /8.

Tell that to Google Chrome developers, who are so arrogant they think they know better than the operating system, and force-resolve *.localhost. to 127.0.0.1

bluejekyll2y ago

‘The ".localhost" TLD has traditionally been statically defined in host DNS implementations as having an A record pointing to the loop back IP address and is reserved for such use. Any other use would conflict with widely deployed code which assumes this use.’

Reading that sentence implies a single loop back address. I appreciate that IPv6 “fixed” this confusion by having a single loop back address of ::1. While you are correct that IPv4 reserved the entire /8 in practice the expectation is generally that 127.0.0.1 is the loopback address, and using other addresses in the 127/8 space tends to lead to unexpected issues across many pieces of software. The intention of the .localhost domain is to ensure that DNS resolutions never resolves to something external, for security reasons.

See also, RFC 5735: “… This is ordinarily implemented using only 127.0.0.1/32 for loopback.” — https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5735

loloquwowndueo2y ago

Then use a non-brain dead browser :)

yrro2y ago

Looks like someone might have been trying to prepare the ground for a hijack of 127.0.0.0/8...

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