How many times have you worked on environments where the customization of hosts inside of a server or environment isn't allowed? or even a more realistic one, you are tired of creating custom hosts in your machine to resolve some uninteresting domains to IP addresses:
192.168.20.44 project1
192.168.20.45 project2
192.168.20.46 project3
192.168.20.47 project4Yeah well, this is necessary and useful as it's easier to type project1 instead of that long IP address. However, there are some special cases when resolving a domain to an IP address from a real DNS is critical. There's always the option to own a domain to do such things, but what if you don't want to spend a dime on it? xip.io is the answer to this question.
What is xip.io?
It's simple, xip.io provides free wildcard DNS resolution for any IP address. It is used in development environments, for example when you work on the implementation of self-signed certificates, you need to have a domain that is allowed on the certificate, xip.io can be used for it, or when your application needs to handle subdomains.
How does it work?
xip.io runs a custom DNS server on the public Internet. When your computer looks up a xip.io domain, the xip.io DNS server extracts the IP address from the domain and sends it back in the response:
For example:
10.0.0.1.xip.io resolves to 10.0.0.1
www.10.0.0.1.xip.io resolves to 10.0.0.1
mysite.10.0.0.1.xip.io resolves to 10.0.0.1
foo.bar.10.0.0.1.xip.io resolves to 10.0.0.1
192.168.20.46.xip.io resolves to 192.168.20.46Happy coding ❤️!
