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Comment by ShinTakuya | Hacker News Reader

Using the hosts file to visit a staging environment is a gross practice anyway. Just make the domain configurable in your code and either but the IP directly or make some subdomain (or better yet, separate domain) redirect to it.

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That doesn't always work. There are migration scenarios where you have to use the correct domain to be able to test everything properly.

I'm not convinced that's the same situation or if what you're describing is necessary in the majority of cases. Using the "correct" domain shouldn't be the norm - it should be an exceptional circumstance. As demonstrated in the above comment, it's easy to accidentally hit the production environment at which point you may be convinced that everything is alright and ship a broken change to production.

In theory I agree with your stance.

OTOH, in the real world, almost all websites that I've got to migrate are somewhat hardcoded for one domain (I've got this side project were I do websites hosting, good recurring money, little work).

Going for /etc/hosts is the only pragmatic choice here.

Yeah, you're right, I'm all for pragmatism when it's just a small site not in active development. I just didn't want people getting the idea that this is a good practice. It's a hack, and a dangerous one at that, but hacks can be okay depending on the circumstance.

It's a quick way to get around iframe requests when the site in question has something like frame-ancestors set and you're doing local development against it. Ignoring the hosts file makes development more difficult. I like firefox and I develop for it first before chrome and safari but I don't agree with your assessment or theirs.

On the one hand yes, what you say makes a lot of sense. In an ideal world you'd have dev, staging, production, all using different configs. Of course then they might different pushes to production might fail.

But one of the things that I'm testing is that SSL, HST-pinning, etc, is working. So I could fuck around with adding "--header" arguments to curl, etc. But really I want to test in a browser and if the name doesn't match I'll have issues.

It's actually really nice to be able to specify a hostname without having to rely on a zillion other services to b available and work. Heck.. maybe there's something wrong with the loadbalancing dns.

Keep - things - separated - isolated - small

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