When I’m doing local development, I sometimes need a domain name that routes back to localhost. I’ve long run into cases where I need subdomains and ended up modifying my local hosts file. I’ve used this for a variety of situations going back for a long time. From Kubernetes ingress work to web development.

While I was reviewing the NGINX ingress guide for Rancher Desktop, I was reminded of localdev.me. There’s a reference to demo.localdev.me that just works. How this works is useful for anoyone who needs subdomains that route back to localhost.

localdev.me DNS is served through amazon. The domain name and any subdomains point to 127.0.0.1.

A Kubernetes example can be found in the deployment documentation for Kubernetes NGINX Ingress controller. The deployment instructions include directions to test that it’s working. They use localdev.me.

The next time you need a custom domain or subdomain for local development, instead of hancking your hosts file you might consider localdev.me.