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Comment by InTheArena | Hacker News Reader

We've used this before, and it seems to be catastrophically unreliable.We had development projects on a internal development reverse proxy that we wanted to specify with a name, and found that it quite often broke down. It could be their DNS relay, or some other network event, but at least once a week, it would simply timeout.

I would kill to be able to specify wildcards in /etc/hosts file. That seems to be the sweet-spot.

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I've used ngrok in the past for exposing local projects but didn't like being time limited and then having someone try to sell me something. The setup I went with is I forward my local http servers port over an ssh tunnel to a local port listening on a gcompute VPS running apache with a virtualhost configured using mod_proxy to listen on a subdomain managed my cloudflare, cloudflare then takes care of the https/ssl certificates and your good to go! This setup has been working better than ngrok for me, The only thing I miss is ngroks logging, but I haven't come accross anything I couldn't debug between apaches access.log and my local development console. For anyone doing this more than once a day I really reccomend investing in building your own infastructure, even if you don't learn a thing or two at least your brushing up on a topic.

Thanks for the advice.

A good alternative to ngrok is Serveo, which has a public instance of self-hosting options: https://serveo.net/

It's not feature-parity with Ngrok, but it does what's needed.

Thanks for the comment- I haven't used Serveo personally, but it looks like a product that ticks pretty much all the boxes my setup goes for without all of the configuration- And their not trying to sell me something +1 for serveo

I don't think it's likely wildcards will ever be implemented in /etc/hosts, but you could hack glibc to support it without too much effort I think (somewhere in this file https://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=blob;f=nss/nss_fil...)

(It's possible that you'll sometimes run into applications that do their own /etc/host parsing.)

We ended up using ngrok for our development builds and while it's certainly a lot more setup (and it costs us money) I am pretty happy with the results and as a customer for that use case.

We sell a SaaS e2e testing product for large enterprises (clients like Microsoft/Wix/JPM etc) and this use case (serving the dev environment to the CI or between computers) was so common that we baked it into our CLI.

This is so absolutely trivial to implement, why would anyone use their service in the first place?

I agree. If you're using it for development within your company, you should just configure your own. There are a number of open source DNS resolvers (some mentioned in these comments) that can be configured to do this.

Still not sure why that is not available

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