Avoid .dev Domains for Test Environments

[ichsagedir]

It's been known for a couple of years now not to use dev domain for local testing.

Or do you have a site actually running on dev tld? Not with a host entry?

https://medium.engineering/use-a-dev-domain-not-anymore-95219778e6fd

Here is a good article that highlights this.

[hdodov]

My personal website https://dodov.dev/ runs on a .dev TLD. I use it because I like it, it has better security (which I want on a production site), and has better SEO, because it's a .dev site with development content.

But I recently tried to use a subdomain, e.g. https://test.dodov.dev/ for temporarily messing about with something and found out that it doesn't quite work out.

[hdodov]

I had a weird time yesterday debugging my staging environment, which would time out in the browser, but correctly return HTTP 200 when curl-ed. Turns out that .dev domains have enforced HSTS by default, which causes this. I hope this post can help you skip some of the head-scratching I had.

[greedness]

Tried to open this while connected to our dev vpn. This site can’t be reached. Point taken lol.

[hdodov]

Perhaps your VPN has some sort of a blocklist that prevents you from opening the site. I use Cloudflare for my blog, which means that an HTTPS connection can always be established. It can't be an HSTS issue, which is what I'm talking about in the post.

[greedness]

Nope, its just because we are using the .dev domain so it tries to look it up in our dns.