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Better comparison
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peterldowns committed May 3, 2023
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## Why build this?
Localias is the tool I've always wanted to use for local web development. After years of just visiting `localhost:8080`, I finally got around to looking for a solution, and came across [hotel](https://github.com/typicode/hotel) (unmaintained) and its fork [chalet](https://jeansaad/chalet) (maintained). These projects (basically the same) have the following drawbacks compared to Localias:
Localias is the tool I've always wanted to use for local web development. After years of just visiting `localhost:8080`, I finally got around to looking for a solution, and came across [hotel](https://github.com/typicode/hotel) (unmaintained) and its fork [chalet](https://jeansaad/chalet) (maintained). These are wonderful projects that served as inspiration for Localias, but I think that Localias compares favorably:

- They require NodeJS
- They require configuring a proxy auto-config file
- They do things I don't want (proxying requests to external domains, process management)
- They don't install their self-signed SSL certificates
- They don't allow teams to easily share configuration files
- Localias is a single binary, whereas Hotel require a working NodeJS runtime
- Localias works by modifying /etc/hosts (and the windows equivalent), which makes it easy to observe and debug. Hotel requires you to configure itself as a proxy in your browser or in your operating system.
- As a consequence, aliases configured with Localias will also work in command-line scipts or requests sent by progarms like `curl`, whereas aliases managed by Hotel will not wokr.
- Localias allows you to create any number of aliases on different TLDs at the same time, but Hotel only allows you to use one TLD.
- Localias will install its root certificate to your system store so that you do not see any warnings about invalid self-signed certificates.
- Localias will automatically discover configuration files committed to your git repository, which makes it easy to share a configuration with you development team.

I also wanted an excuse to play around with building a MacOS app, and this seemed like a small and well-defined problem that would be amenable to learning Swift.

Finally, [my friend Justin wanted this to exist, too](https://twitter.com/jmduke/status/1628034461605539840?s=20):

> I swear there's a tool that lets me do:
>
> localhost:8000 → application.local
> localhost:3000 → marketing.local
> localhost:3002 → docs.local
> localhost:8000 → application.local
> localhost:3000 → marketing.local
> localhost:3002 → docs.local
>
> But I can't for the life of me remember the name of it. Does anyone know what I'm talking about?

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