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Comment by Kiro | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain what the puprose is?

If you develop multiple websites on your local machine, you distinguish them by using different domain names for each of them. You might have site1.dev and site2.dev.

There are a variety of methods to handle this, but commonly you add a record to your system's host file to resolve these domain names to the ip address 127.0.0.1 (your local computer).

Using site1.til.io and site2.til.io instead eliminates having to manage that host file (which is a minor and repetitive annoyance).

.dev? heathen! .local please :)

I actually was using .local previously, but my co-workers all use .dev so I assumed that was more common ;p.

Careful; if you or your coworkers use OS X, you may run into conflicts with Bonjour-registered hostnames.

.local conflicts with Bonjour, so it's not as good.

.local has special handling that you don't want on OSX. Use .dev

For instance: http://www.charlesproxy.com/documentation/faqs/accessing-loc...

I use .lan - shorter, and doesn't mess with OS X.

I've always used mywebsite.localhost

If it's completely client side you can just put a ~/dev folder under Apache / nginx and never have to worry about any of that.

If you are using OSX try to use virtualhost.sh, it,a available in Brew and makes adding new vhost quick and easy

I've also used xip.io (a similar service) when testing a web application that did multi-tenancy via subdomains.

Is the point of this that a proxy server on your local machine has access to the domain names (site1.til.io and site2.til.io) and can forward the request to the appropriate service on your local machine by modulating on the subdomain?

For example, I use dev.projectname.com for every project I work on locally. This way, the auto-filled usernames/passwords never get mixed up between projects, as they do when you do everything on 127.0.0.1:8000

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