(17-09-2014, 10:51 AM)xero Wrote: dear UNIX diary,
today i showed my boss how to spoof production urls as localhost for offline testing!

at my new job i've been learning nodejs. it's pretty cool writing end-to-end javascript for a project. the idea is that all our clients have a given url (e.g. http://nixers.net) and in the project code we use that url all over the place. when it's time to make a fix it's difficult to test on localhost when all the urls redirect you to the live site. when my co-workers we're talking about how they test, they told me they use a cluster of virtual staging servers that the devops team sets up for us to act as a given domain. i asked my boss why we needed this since we could all do that locally. the secret is editing your hosts file and telling your box to respond as that domain.

- edit /etc/host
- add a new line in this format: ip-address hostname.domain.org hostname
- 127.0.0.1 nixers.net nixers.net
- save the file.
- start the nodejs frontend in the cli
- sudo node app --url http://localhost:4000 --p 80 -w 0

now all requests to http://nixers.net (or in the node world http://nixers.net:3000 - depending on how you setup your dev ports) will redirect to http://localhost/!!!

i got some "brownie points" with my boss for that one! unix to the rescue!

Best way to do this is at an application level though. You shouldn't be spoofing production URLs because it can lead to a greater chance of error. Say you're testing API calls locally and you forget to spoof your domain. You've ended up making them all on production.

What you should do instead is in your routes, associate a host to each controller. In the application configuration, you can set the default host to "production.com" and overwrite it in a development environment.

For instance,
Where the values in staging + development overwrite settings in default.json.

You can use environmental variables to control this further, and catch the environment in node.
You can access it in node with

Most importantly, I suggest you implement something like this:
https://github.com/web-napopa/node-reversable-router
And then replace all hardcoded urls with calls to
url('named_route').