It's not quite the same, but I've moved to using *.localhost for all my local web dev work. All modern browsers will resolve *.localhost to 127.0.0.1 internally. No need to setup any DNS resolvers or edit your hosts file.
But that only really helps you when you're dealing with websites in a browser, and when you want the address to resolve back to your local machine. So it wont help you with other programs like python/wget/etc or any calls you make to getaddrinfo()
Yeah I've been doing this as well. I know it's a minor nit, but I wish that TLD was shorter. I've used *.local in the past but that has bitten me too many times.
Good tip, I didn't realize the browser would automatically resolve any subdomain of localhost to 127.0.0.1/::1 as well these days.
I tested on Chrome but I assume this is true for Safari as well?
we have dev.our-root-domain.com in public DNS pointing to 127.0.0.1
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The best part is that *.*.localhost is also supported, so you can finally just replace *.com for your prod domains with *.localhost.
ArchiveBox now uses this feature by default in the latest version to finally offer unique per-snapshot domain isolation, so we can safely replay archived JS without risking compromise of your whole archive.
Such an awesome feature, the barrier to do this used to be prohibitively high but now it "just works".