Enhancing Local Development with Acrylic DNS

Enhancing Local Development with Acrylic DNS

By in Development Tag ,

Web development often requires testing with various subdomains, and configuring them traditionally can be a hassle. Acrylic DNS Proxy for Windows provides an elegant solution with its wildcard DNS feature, simplifying the local development process.

What is Acrylic DNS?

Acrylic DNS Proxy is a local DNS proxy server for Windows. It excels in DNS caching to speed up browsing, but a standout feature for developers is its support for wildcard DNS entries. This feature is particularly useful for coding and testing websites locally.

Wildcard DNS

Acrylic allows developers to use wildcard DNS entries. This means you can redirect all subdomain requests to your local machine without needing to set up each subdomain individually in your hosts file.

For example, *.localtest.me can resolve to 127.0.0.1, streamlining the process of testing multiple subdomains. For me, this is it’s number one feature.

Setting Up Acrylic DNS for Local Development

  1. Install Acrylic DNS: Download and install Acrylic DNS Proxy on your Windows machine.
  2. Configure Wildcard DNS: Edit the AcrylicHosts.txt file to include your wildcard DNS entries. For instance, 127.0.0.1 *.localdev.com.
  3. Point to Acrylic DNS: Update your network adapter’s DNS settings to use 127.0.0.1, enabling Acrylic to handle DNS requests.
  4. Seamless Subdomain Testing: Start testing your web applications on various subdomains locally without additional network configuration.

Advantages for Web Development

  • Simplified Configuration: No need to edit hosts file for each new subdomain.
  • Efficient Testing: Test applications on multiple subdomains simultaneously.
  • Time-Saving: Reduces the setup time for testing complex web applications.
  • Local Environment Mimicking Production: Test your application in an environment that closely resembles production setups.

Conclusion

For web developers working on Windows, Acrylic DNS Proxy is a valuable tool. Its support for wildcard DNS entries significantly eases the process of developing and testing web applications on various subdomains locally.

By reducing setup times and mimicking production environments, Acrylic DNS enhances the developer experience, allows for more meaningful URLs and makes changing DNS entries a breeze.

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Stephen

Hi, my name is Stephen Finchett. I have been a software engineer for over 30 years and worked on complex, business critical, multi-user systems for all of my career. For the last 15 years, I have been concentrating on web based solutions using the Microsoft Stack including ASP.Net, C#, TypeScript, SQL Server and running everything at scale within Kubernetes.