use .test instead of .dev as development domain

[snoek09]

Since .dev is an official Top Level Domain it should not be used for local development.
Also, Chrome forces https on these domains.

[javiereguiluz]

I've discussed this issue privately with some community members. It's true that .dev is problematic because it belongs to Google and Chrome does undesirable things with it ... but .test doesn't feel 100% right.

[wouterj]

This used to be .dev as, at the time of writing this docs, the official Homestead docs used .dev as well.

Meanwhile, the TLD used in the official docs was changed a couple time (e.g. .app, .localhost laravel/homestead#674 and .test laravel/homestead#697 ).

According to RFC 2606, these TLDs are reserved:

To safely satisfy these needs, four domain names are reserved as
listed and described below.

               .test
            .example
            .invalid
          .localhost

  ".test" is recommended for use in testing of current or new DNS
  related code.

  ".example" is recommended for use in documentation or as examples.

  ".invalid" is intended for use in online construction of domain
  names that are sure to be invalid and which it is obvious at a
  glance are invalid.

  The ".localhost" TLD has traditionally been statically defined in
  host DNS implementations as having an A record pointing to the
  loop back IP address and is reserved for such use.  Any other use
  would conflict with widely deployed code which assumes this use.

As MacOS does the loopback to 127.0.0.1 as described in the final paragraph, it is unusable for Homestead. .example and .invalid don't seem to be correct for these cases, as it's focused on documentation purposes.

To make a long story short: Big 👍 for using .test, which is also in sync with the current official Homestead docs.

[javiereguiluz]

It's "funny" that the right one (.localhost) doesn't work as expected ... and the one which works (.test) is "the wrong one" because it's intended for DNS testing 😲

[wouterj]

Well, .localhost is only good for localhost running sites. In this case, it's not a localhost but a virtual Homestead host running your site, so .localhost isn't the good one. Actually, there is no real good TLD for this purpose...

[weaverryan]

Thanks Henry!