This would have come in handy when I was doing a lot of testing of our mobile
apps. At work we have a “live” silo and a “dark” silo. For large deployments,
we stage the new builds in the “dark” silo and test it there. Then when it’s
time to go live with the new builds, we update the load balancers to swap the
silos and make the new code live. Pointing native apps to the dark silo
is kinda tricky since there is no /etc/hosts/ file to edit. I have been
testing by running my own DNS server on my laptop, but that is a pain. I’m
going to play with xip.io to see if it can help me with this kind of
testing.
From the website:
xip.io is a magic domain name that provides wildcard DNS
for any IP address. Say your LAN IP address is 10.0.0.1.
Using xip.io,10.0.0.1.xip.io resolves to 10.0.0.1 www.10.0.0.1.xip.io resolves to 10.0.0.1 mysite.10.0.0.1.xip.io resolves to 10.0.0.1 foo.bar.10.0.0.1.xip.io resolves to 10.0.0.1…and so on. You can use these domains to access virtual
hosts on your development web server from devices on your
local network, like iPads, iPhones, and other computers.
No configuration required!