2 minute read

Migrating from .dev to .localhost with puma-dev

I’ve been a long-time user of Pow, but with Google’s purchase of the .dev top-level domain, I’m in search of a new way of running Rack-compatible local applications. I’ve found puma-dev to work well over the new top-level domain of .localhost.

I’ve been a long-time user of Pow to manage my local development environment. If you’re not familiar, it maps local hostnames like http://myapp.dev to a folder (say, ~/projects/myapp) and will start/stop the myapp project’s development server with Rack.

This worked great… until Chrome 63.

Chrome 63, released December 6, 2017, requires all .dev domains to be loaded over https because Google purchased the .dev top-level domain and decided it would require https via HSTS.

I found this gem in the Pow release notes:

This is the last release for the forseeable future. Check out puma-dev for a contemporary alternative.

Migrating from pow to puma-dev

Although I could have upgraded Pow to fix the issue, Pow hasn’t been working well with features required to build more modern apps like WebSockets and SSL certificates — so I was well ready to move along to something new. My upgrade steps:

  1. Uninstalled pow.

    curl get.pow.cx/uninstall.sh | sh

  2. Installed puma-dev.

    brew install puma/puma/puma-dev

  3. Ran sudo puma-dev -setup to do some more junk (configuring /etc/resolver, but you don’t need to know anything about that).

  4. Ran puma-dev -install -d localhost to bind puma-dev to .localhost domains. I chose .localhost because it’s obvious what it’s doing (myapp.localhost clearly points to your machine) instead of the other newly-emerging standard, .test.

  5. Ran puma-dev link in each app directory to symlink them to subdomains of .localhost.

  6. You may need to resolve a Root CA issue, see below.

Now, I’m able to access http://myapp.localhost happily (as well as https://myapp.localhost) again!

Resolved root CA issue

After following the above steps, I began to have an issue where the automatically-generated SSL certificates used for HTTPS were only trusted in some cases. Turns out the issue was that puma-dev had installed the root CA certificate in my login keychain, and not in the system one. To fix:

  1. Launch “Keychain Access” from Applications.

  2. Search for the “Puma-dev CA” certificate.

  3. Drag the certificate to the “System” keychain.

  4. Enter your password to allow the change.

  5. Restart the application where certificates were not trusted (Chrome, for example).