I am fortunate to get time off during the holidays from my "mysterious day job" (hint: it involves programming websites). After almost two weeks of not thinking about my codebase, I sit down to start coding and trying to remember what exactly I was working on when out of the blue my development web server refusing to serve up my pages, leaving me with no way to test my code. I run a web server in a virtual machine on my development laptop to test my code. It's a pretty slick system, but I'll save the details for another post. The short version is has worked pretty seamlessly for months, then all of the sudden it stops working. I spend a little bit debugging and it turns out it only fails in Chrome while still working in Firefox.
Saddled with this mystery, I turned a developer's best friend: Google. It took a few sites, but Google didn't let me down. Turns out we were using the wrong top-level domains for our local websites. For years we've been using either .dev or .app for a local domain (ie example.dev or example.app) Turns out we can't do that anymore. Both of these are registered as new official domains and the latest version of Chrome requires those domains to be served via HTTPS, which I don't bother with on my local environment. Thanks to Medium Engineering which I recommend as a read to anybody who wishing more details and history.
The recommended domains to use locally are .localhost and .test. However, .localhost is understood to be running at 127.0.0.1 and that was not the case for me since I was running my web server in a VM. So I switched over my development environment to "example.test" and everything started working smoothly again. I know this is not the most dramatic or exciting of development stories, but I wanted to share since it caught me by total surprise and if the google results are any indication, I'm not the only one who was a little confused.
If you have any additional questions, please leave a comment and I will get back to you soon.