If you run local development environment with your own TLD (.dev, .local, etc) then you have run into times where the browser trumps your local domain by routing it, or worse, by searching with it.
homtld is a Safari Extension that forces the Smart Search to treat URIs ending in your protected top level domain(s) like the universally accepted ones (ie. .com).
We have all gotten too lazy to type http:// and so every major browser has some helper that decides when to search or retrieve a URL. It makes it so that github.com takes you to their site but Maritime law goes to your search engine. That's great when the browser recognizes your TLD. However, my preferred local (.odd) isn't recognized so I kept searching the google for client1.odd. Granted, it's only a minor annoyance but this Monday was the wrong day.
Waiting on Apple to have this up in the Safari Extensions Gallery.
Until then, you can install manually by:
- Clicking here to download the .safariextz file.
- Find and click the file to get Safari to open it.
- Decide if you want to Trust it or wait until it's in the aforementioned Extensions Gallery.
- Assuming that you trusted it, then you can configure it.
| option | default | description |
|---|---|---|
| Protected TLDs (comma separated) | .odd, .local |
comma separated list of suffixes (TDLs) that the extension will look for. |
| Use SSL | false |
whether to prepend http:// or https:// |
| Silence Alarm | true |
mostly for debugging, this does a javascript alert when it captures a TLD |
Works by intercepting the SafariBeforeSearchEvent and examining the query string to see if it ends (ignoring whitespace) in a protected TLD. If it finds one of these protected strings then it adds http:// or https:// (if you pick 'Use SSL') to the start of the query. Otherwise it just gets out of the way.
If you're concerned about security, it doesn't have access to anything. Just grabs the query and prepends to it.
MacOS High Sierra (10.13) doing a wildcard custom domain name (*.odd) using:
- Apache - because it's conveniently preinstalled on macOS
- dnsmasq - awesome tool to give me wildcard subdomain names
- ... and a bunch more that are irrelevant to this project (github, homebrew, mysql, etc, etc, etc)
For those who are unfamiliar, this setup allows me to define *.odd domains to all route to 127.0.0.1 and end up in appropriate subfolders within my DocumentRoot:
| url | destination |
|---|---|
| client1.odd | ~/Sites/client1 |
| client2.odd | ~/Sites/client2 |
| home.odd | ~/Sites/home |
I like to use *.odd as my development domain because I despise .test and .dev is a hot mess since being bought.
- Port over to Chrome (and Firefox?)
- Get some Pizza
MIT