Custom domains with HTTPS for your localhost servers on macOS | Sangeeth's Blog
If you’ve ever worked on multiple web projects locally, you might be familiar with the pain when it comes to serving them over localhost addresses: assigning and remembering those damn port numbers. If it’s just one project, you can use a port like 3000 and call it a day. But if you’re switching between projects or running them in parallel, you got to start giving them unique ports and remember them when typing in the address bar. And what about being able to use https:// with those localhost addresses and getting that to work without scary warning pages? More pain.
What if you could simplify all of this and just make it work? What if you could type https://react.test and have it point to your Vite server? Or https://api.test point to your Node server? Or https://preprod.project.test and have it point to the pre-prod server running locally? Buckle up.
We need two tools for this. First up—Caddy. It’s one of my favorite pieces of software and I use it to host and proxy everything under sangeeth.dev including this very blog. I got drawn towards Caddy many years ago seeing the simplicity of the configuration file and the promise of an extremely low-config HTTPS setup that it offered out of the box. While you can use Caddy to host public sites, you can also utilize it for your local projects to serve them over HTTPS as well as to avoid mucking around with port numbers.
