i know, but the OP's goal was to host/access http(s) services with names and avoid port numbers, and gopher service name was chosen by me as an example. my point was that /etc/services cannot be used for the OP's need.
if you host an http(s) service on port 11111 you can reach it with url http://127.1:11111, but url http://127.1:vce/ would not work in most software.
i chose gopher port just as an example. try with any other service name mapped to a port number from /etc/services and the result will be the same. the OP's goal was to use many http/https services, so we are talking about many http(s) services.
i just wanted to make the point that even if you have service names in /etc/services, it is not possible to use that names easily to host/access http(s) services.
Perhaps we could even make the file the port itself, perhaps calling it a “socket”? A “unix socket” would be a great name. If we could place all these files behind a local reverse proxy then we could use localhost/jekyll or localhost/fastapi. It’s just a dream
Not modern enough. Unix is too low level, antiquated, and discriminates against those who just want to get shit done instead of reading manpages or documentation by hand.
Sure, but they are running web-apps they've vibe-coded (hence the .vibe tld) and for that use-case of many web apps that I run in docker containers I use nginx-proxy [0]. All the container needs is a VIRTUAL_HOST environment variable with the domain and what my router needs is an address entry for the wildcard subdomains. I even have nginx-proxy on a internet-accessible staging server.
This is exact problem I see with all of those vibe coded software: In few years everything will be super fragmented, everyone will be using their own set of tools, or vibe coding them, themselves. Communication between teams or even between team members will become very hard because of those differences. 'What do you mean production is down? On my vibe coded dashboard everything is green!'
Why do people always assume that change is permanent?
It's never.
After decentralisation we always see decentralisation.
After a period of growth, a decline will follow.
After the vibe coding hype, consolidation will follow.
After rain comes sunshine.
> It's like someone should make a file... maybe in /etc ... and put short names for services in it... maybe it could be called /etc/services...
People shit-talk container orchestration systems like Kubernetes, but if anything they greatly simplified (if not completely eliminated) the need for this sort of network bookkeeping.
I know it's mixing of layers, but I can't help but feel the IPv6 transition missed the boat when they didn't just get rid of ports in the process. They've changed so much else anyway.
Want to run another webserver instance or whatever on your computer? Get the OS to allocate a new IP for it. Ports be damned.
Could be implemented in a backwards compatible way by requiring all IPv6 TCP/UDP traffic to use a fixed port number.
ipv6 packet does not have any port field. ports are on the level of tcp and udp, and you don't have to use tcp or udp on top of ipv6. ipv4 packet does not have any port information as well.
There's a simple method you can use with nginx and /etc/hosts, I wrote about it couple days ago [0]. I used it for an internal demo recently and realized that a new breed of devs have never seen a non localhost url run locally.
I think this product demonstrates the atrophying of thought that results from too much LLM usage: design was obviously a long back-and-forth with a sycophantic LLM.
I find out what all my local servers are by `cat /etc/hosts`, because I put them in there. They run using an entry in the nginx config.
For short-lived stuff I don't even bother with that, I just use `whatever.localhost`.
If there was no LLM, author would have put a little more thought into this, maybe did a google search, and realised that all he needed were two shell scripts.
The more you use LLMs, the less you actually think
> The real annoyance is that it wasn’t just one machine. It was layers.
> I wanted a simple launcher for all the things that aren’t traditional desktop apps. Not Finder, Alfred or Raycast.
The entire damn article is like this - why would I trust software to run on my local machine when it was written by someone who did not even take care writing a blog post? How much care would they have possibly put into reviewing their vibe coded slop if they couldn't even bother to review their blog post?
This is literally what mDNS is for. Didn't even know that it was a thing until I needed it for some custom firmware I was writing recently. It's like DNS but also has service port advertisements.
There is no need to come up with "local TLDs" like .vibe, .local, .test and so on -- there is already an industry convention! macOS and most Linux distros support subdomains of localhost, so <anything>.localhost works. You still need the reverse proxy to do the host->port mapping, but you save yourself local DNS fiddling.
> There is no need to come up with "local TLDs" like .vibe, .local, .test and so on -- there is already an industry convention! macOS and most Linux distros support subdomains of localhost, so <anything>.localhost works.
That would work if your goal was to route traffic to localhost.
What if it isn't?
There are reasons why the likes of example.com exists.
> So I built local.vibe — a friendly dashboard and local .vibe hostname for every local web app on your Mac. No more localhost:3000 vs localhost:5173 roulette.
> The whole thing communicates over a Unix socket acting as a reverse proxy. No external services, no accounts, no telemetry.
We’re discussing a tool that is designed for – and is only capable of – routing traffic to localhost. It’s perfectly reasonable to point out that there’s an easier solution for this use case.
example.com, and the reserved TLD ".example", exist for technical documentation and writing. If you are writing a comment on HN, or a curriculum for a networking class, then you can discuss "foo.example.com connects to bar.example.com" or "Let's hypothesize about two offices called accounts.example and human-resources.example"
The "example" domains are never supposed to reflect anything that is actually deployed onto LANs, or test labs, or the Internet, current situation notwithstanding.
There are, likewise, IPv4 and IPv6 ranges that are reserved to be used in documentation. Not the 192.168.0.0/24 or 10.0.0.0/8, but separate ranges that writers only write about, and are never deployed, not even in private.
And there's also .local for mDNS on local network!
I've also come across projects using a public DNS record that points to 127.0.0.1 (something like localtest.me?). IMO that's way worse than using .localhost since you're trusting some rando not to change the DNS records and exfiltrate your meant-to-be-local traffic.
Why not resolve everything with UNIX sockets instead, that way you can have them named and scoped instead, hiding behind port 443, since it's mosly HTTP anyway.
works with curl, maybe there is a case to either build a proxy for UDS and expose them to a browser, or open a request ticket to browser maintainers to support UDS
This is a valid concern, certainly. I use kube for most things so it's not a problem, but my homeserver and its apps run on quadlets that I manage. In my case, I just added a README.md in the server account folder that each project's CLAUDE.md or whatever is configured to read. Then it selects a port and sticks that in the document and to be honest I have a few tens of services and it works. Haha, a direct replacement of machine for my own process.
I use Cloudflare Tunnel so most of the products I build are exposed and listed there. I just add comments for those that aren't exposed (eg. browser extension dev port) to that file too. A single doc means coding agents know to look there and keep it updated too.
Vercel’s portless is a great alternative, but unfortunately it doesn’t work well with oauth flows.
I’ve built portmap[0] to solve that. Also comes with skills which makes it work really great with coding agents (instructions in the readme).
I use subdomains on an OVH VPS, since I want to access the services outside the network, so I can use freshrss.mydomain.com. But anything that can rationalize port number sprawl is welcome.
I've built this twice before. The main problem that I hit is that the AI agents suck at the process lifecycle management: leaving processes alive, starting the same daemon multiple times, etc.
From a brief glance over the code I like the approaches I see. Using the `/etc/resolver/` mechanism is a new trick to me!
The interesting part to me isn't the port numbers, it's the automatic service start/stop, including idle route shutdown.
Also, a service port is always qualified by its protocol. There are separate port namespaces for each IP protocol that uses ports. "8483" is not a service port, until you spell it out:
This project is essentially "give me some metadata & a command which takes env $PORT, and I'll handle the rest". Which is neat!
I am also sick of handling port numbers - I end up allocating them on a schema to different services, so for testing I can spool any VM/service combination and avoid crossover. But if I want the same service twice, ah...
It always fascinated me that ports don't have any kind of textual resolver, so you can bind to `:1234` and also say "please also accept `:foobar`".
But that would itself require some kind of "port resolver" on a device, and that's another service to break and fix :)
It is funny, I just built something like this last week and named it "Network". Additionally it scans for any type of data packages arriving at the SonicWall and sees if they are approved by me or not. I am paranoid after using TP Link at home like a dumbass.
This is a neat approach. One thing I wonder about is how it handles services that use the same port number across different protocols (like 443 for both HTTPS and SMTPS). The /etc/services file approach has the same ambiguity, but at least it lists the protocol alongside the port. A lookup table that includes protocol would be more robust for mixed environments.
nc is for generic connections and handles it well.
if you host an http(s) service on port 11111 you can reach it with url http://127.1:11111, but url http://127.1:vce/ would not work in most software.
is it http or gopher? :)
i just wanted to make the point that even if you have service names in /etc/services, it is not possible to use that names easily to host/access http(s) services.
You can still publish port numbers along with addresses in DNS though (SRV records).
The article is short; go read it then come back and delete.
[0] https://github.com/nginx-proxy/nginx-proxy
It's never.
After decentralisation we always see decentralisation. After a period of growth, a decline will follow. After the vibe coding hype, consolidation will follow. After rain comes sunshine.
People shit-talk container orchestration systems like Kubernetes, but if anything they greatly simplified (if not completely eliminated) the need for this sort of network bookkeeping.
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6761#section-6.3
Want to run another webserver instance or whatever on your computer? Get the OS to allocate a new IP for it. Ports be damned.
Could be implemented in a backwards compatible way by requiring all IPv6 TCP/UDP traffic to use a fixed port number.
[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/say-no-to-localhost3000-use-custom-...
[1]: https://github.com/peterldowns/localias
I find out what all my local servers are by `cat /etc/hosts`, because I put them in there. They run using an entry in the nginx config.
For short-lived stuff I don't even bother with that, I just use `whatever.localhost`.
If there was no LLM, author would have put a little more thought into this, maybe did a google search, and realised that all he needed were two shell scripts.
The more you use LLMs, the less you actually think
> The real annoyance is that it wasn’t just one machine. It was layers.
> I wanted a simple launcher for all the things that aren’t traditional desktop apps. Not Finder, Alfred or Raycast.
The entire damn article is like this - why would I trust software to run on my local machine when it was written by someone who did not even take care writing a blog post? How much care would they have possibly put into reviewing their vibe coded slop if they couldn't even bother to review their blog post?
Granted no fancy UI to start and stop things but is it really needed?
Tbh this is not a single binary you need dnsmasq go and other things
That would work if your goal was to route traffic to localhost.
What if it isn't?
There are reasons why the likes of example.com exists.
> So I built local.vibe — a friendly dashboard and local .vibe hostname for every local web app on your Mac. No more localhost:3000 vs localhost:5173 roulette.
> The whole thing communicates over a Unix socket acting as a reverse proxy. No external services, no accounts, no telemetry.
We’re discussing a tool that is designed for – and is only capable of – routing traffic to localhost. It’s perfectly reasonable to point out that there’s an easier solution for this use case.
example.com, and the reserved TLD ".example", exist for technical documentation and writing. If you are writing a comment on HN, or a curriculum for a networking class, then you can discuss "foo.example.com connects to bar.example.com" or "Let's hypothesize about two offices called accounts.example and human-resources.example"
The "example" domains are never supposed to reflect anything that is actually deployed onto LANs, or test labs, or the Internet, current situation notwithstanding.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.example
There are, likewise, IPv4 and IPv6 ranges that are reserved to be used in documentation. Not the 192.168.0.0/24 or 10.0.0.0/8, but separate ranges that writers only write about, and are never deployed, not even in private.
localhost is only ever going to be the loopback interface, never across a network: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.localhost#Conventional_use
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.test
The latter article lists foreign-language TLDs which serve the same purpose.
Some proposals are described here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.home
I've also come across projects using a public DNS record that points to 127.0.0.1 (something like localtest.me?). IMO that's way worse than using .localhost since you're trusting some rando not to change the DNS records and exfiltrate your meant-to-be-local traffic.
Not too long ago I had a similar issue and solved with that.
[0] https://github.com/JonasKs/portmap
https://github.com/basecamp/pow/tree/master
From a brief glance over the code I like the approaches I see. Using the `/etc/resolver/` mechanism is a new trick to me!
The interesting part to me isn't the port numbers, it's the automatic service start/stop, including idle route shutdown.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47452515
> The real annoyance is that it wasn’t just one machine. It was layers.
173 looks like ITE
5 in roman numerals is V.
If you type "8483" on T9, your phone may offer "THUD" or "TITE" or all three, as choices.
But with a normal telephone keypad, if you dial, e.g. "(800) 555-VITE" then you will always dial "8483".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoneword
Also, a service port is always qualified by its protocol. There are separate port namespaces for each IP protocol that uses ports. "8483" is not a service port, until you spell it out:
or or or etc.A TCP stream, for example, consists of a tuple:
I am also sick of handling port numbers - I end up allocating them on a schema to different services, so for testing I can spool any VM/service combination and avoid crossover. But if I want the same service twice, ah...
It always fascinated me that ports don't have any kind of textual resolver, so you can bind to `:1234` and also say "please also accept `:foobar`". But that would itself require some kind of "port resolver" on a device, and that's another service to break and fix :)