mehserve

A simple port-sharing proxy for development on multiple local domains, supports websockets

Usage no npm install needed!

<script type="module">
  import mehserve from 'https://cdn.skypack.dev/mehserve';
</script>

README

mehserve 🤷‍♂️

Patreon donate button Package on npm Follow MIT license

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ serve: a simple port-sharing proxy for development on multiple local domains, supports websockets (e.g. for webpack hot module replacement), SSL termination, and queuing requests whilst development server restarts so you don't get the annoying connection refused messages.

E.g. imagine you have Create React App running on port 3000, a Node.js server running on port 3030, and a Rails API running on port 3060, you can use mehserve to make these available as https://client.meh, https://server.meh and https://api.meh respectively. (Commands to enable this would be: mehserve add client 3000; mehserve add server 3030; mehserve add api 3060; followed by mehserve ssl client.meh commands for each domain to walk you through enabling SSL.)

NOTE: since Google registered the .dev TLD in 2015 and then forced certificate pinning on it in 2017 you can no longer use *.dev domains without a lot of work. Fortunately mehserve supports *.meh domains which was originally a joke... Hopefully no-one registers the .meh TLD!

Features ✨

  • Quick (near instant) startup
  • Built in DNS server to redirect _.meh to 127.0.0.1 (requires additional configuration for your system to use this server)
  • Proxies regular HTTP requests and websocket connections based on the Host HTTP header
  • Easy to configure
  • Subdomain configuration is updated on a per-request basis - no need to restart server
  • supports xip.io and .localhost domains
  • SSL termination (using SNI to support multiple domains on one port)
  • Self-signed SSL certificate generation and help installing
  • mehserve run --exponential-backoff will automatically re-attempt requests when your development server restarts (e.g. due to file changes) saving you from receiving the error page in the intervening seconds (ALPHA)

Status ✅

I've been using this for a few years now, it's been very smooth for me. I work on a lot of different projects in parallel. YMMV. This is NOT for production usage, it's only intended for use on your own development machine!

Getting Started 🚀

Mehserve itself should run on Linux and OS X, but to have .meh domains resolve to localhost and to have it run on port 80 you need to do a little additional configuration.

We've currently only instructed you how to do this on OS X and Ubuntu; pull requests welcome.

Installing 💾

npm install -g mehserve
mehserve install

follow the instructions to set up port forwarding and DNS resolution.

Running 🏃‍♀️

To run the server:

mehserve run

We don't currently daemonize the server, pull requests to add this functionality would be welcome. In the mean time we recommend you set up pm2 and then tell it to run mehserve with:

pm2 start `which mehserve` -- run --exponential-backoff && pm2 dump

Configuring subdomains ⚙️

Port forwarding ↪️

To set up a subdomain, simply run

mehserve add mysite 1337

This'll tell mehserve to proxy all HTTP requests for mysite.meh, mysite.localhost, and mysite.*.*.*.*.xip.io to localhost:1337

Static files 📄

Alternatively, to serve static files:

mehserve add staticsite /path/to/public

This'll tell mehserve to serve static content from /path/to/public/ to anyone requesting http://staticsite.meh/ or http://mysite.localhost

SSL certificates 🔐

If you want a local domain to be served with SSL you must generate a certificate for it:

mehserve ssl staticsite

Then follow the instructions.

DNS resolution fails whilst offline 🌎

This is an issue with discoveryd (it also affects Pow - see https://github.com/basecamp/pow/issues/471) - should be fixed by updating to OS X 10.10.4

Configuration location 🧭

Configuration is saved as files stored under ~/.mehserve. To remove a service registered as myapi, delete the file ~/.mehserve/myapi (and any related files such as SSL certificates/keys/etc).

Troubleshooting 🕵️

  • If you get the message "Invalid Host header" in your Vue project, add disableHostCheck: true to the devServer section of your vue.config.js. More information here.

TODO 😅

Pull requests welcome!

  • Tests
  • Daemonize
  • Scripts directory organzation
    mehserve
└── extras
    ├── macos-launchd
    ├── supervisord
    ├── systemd
    └── systemv
  • Homebrew (node formula dependency) Homebrew CONTRIBUTING

Removing old .dev TLD

As .dev is now a valid TLD we no longer use it as the domain extension. If you have installed an older version of mehserve you can remove local resolving of the .dev domain by running sudo rm /etc/resolver/dev from a terminal.