Aren't you exposing your dev instance to the world then? Not worried about that?
For example, postulate a DNS entry of myTopSecrets mapped to localhost. If you use it, it will be routed to your own computer. If someone else uses it, they would be routed to their own computer. The same follows for IP addresses within your local area network.
Unless you did extra work outside the scope of DNS, nothing in your lan is addressable from outside your lan.
Between this and certificate transparency logs, it seems insane to me that the commonly advised Correct Setup, to be able to experiment and hack random little personal stuff, and have it reliably work on modern browsers, requires you to 1) buy a subscription (domain), 2) enter into another subscription-ish contractual relationship (Let's Encrypt), and 3) announce to the whole world what you're doing (possibly in two places!).
Imagine your computer stops booting up because you repositioned your desk, and everyone tells you the Correct Way to do it is to file a form with the post office, and apply for a free building permit from the local council. That's how this feels.
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[0] - I'm honestly afraid of DNS. I keep losing too much of my life to random name resolution failures, whose fixes work non-deterministically. Or at least I was until ~yesterday, when I randomly found out about https://messwithdns.net, and there I learned that nameservers are required to have a negative cache, which they use to cache failed lookups, often with absurdly high timeout values. That little bit of knowledge finally lets me make sense of those problems.
I have previously used https://github.com/jsha/minica which makes it at least easy to create a root certificate and matching server cert. How to get that root cert trusted on different array of devices is another story.
If you already own a domain, it's pretty convenient.
Not if you only present that name in local DNS, and use a wildcard certificate to avoid needing to reveal the name via a SAN cert or other externally referable information.
Also, perhaps refrain from calling it myTopSecrets. Perhaps ProjectLooBreak instead.
Yes, a more sane approach is just use replit or the like, but this thread is about keeping it complicated.
> 2) enter into another subscription-ish contractual relationship (Let's Encrypt),
afaik, LE only does certs on machines for which they can see.
Taking a moment to look it up, I'm incorrect, it looks like you can establish LE with a DNS challenge instead of http. [0]
0. https://letsencrypt.org/docs/challenge-types/#dns-01-challen...