Manuel van Rijn

Bit blog

Rails subdomains for localhost/development

Today I’ve just released version 1.0.0 of my latest gem local-subdomain offering subdomain support for your development environment, out of the box.

In this post I’d like to describe my findings and motivations.

What I’d used to do

To support subdomains during development is frustrating. By default you can’t have some subdomain.localhost to just bind to localhost. So you have to edit your /etc/hosts file to add some fake subdomain and when you have to test another subdomain, you’d had to edit the file again and again and… well you get my point.

But then!

I’ve stubbled on the magic domain http://lvh.me which redirects all request (including subdomains) to 127.0.0.1. This means http://some-subdomain.lvh.me:3000 redirects to 127.0.0.1 on port 3000 and let request.subdomain to return some-subdomain within your Rails controller.

$ dig lvh.me
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; <<>> DiG 9.8.3-P1 <<>> lvh.me
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 48494
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 2, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;lvh.me.        IN  A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
lvh.me.     3600  IN  A 127.0.0.1

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
lvh.me.     3600  IN  NS  ns36.domaincontrol.com.
lvh.me.     3600  IN  NS  ns35.domaincontrol.com.

;; Query time: 167 msec
;; SERVER: 90.145.32.32#53(90.145.32.32)
;; WHEN: Tue May 19 23:05:01 2015
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 95

Why this gem?

This week I started on a side project, requiring subdomain support. I remembered that I could use http://lvh.me but when I browsed to the url it just said ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED

After some time I remembered Rails binds the development environment by default to localhost which is != 127.0.0.1 where http://lvh.me is redirecting to..

So after fixing this, I remembered to have some code, that checks if you are browsing to http://localhost:3000 to redirect to http://lvh.me:3000. Just to help remember and enforce request for subdomains to go through http://lvh.me

So a gem it is!

As many developers, I don’t like to repeat myself, and decided to make the above two steps possible within a gem.

1. The before filter

The easy part was creating a module that adds a before_filter to the controller where the module LocalSubdomain is included. The action would check if the request is from lvh.me and if not, redirect to it. Nothing special.

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module LocalSubdomain
  extend ActiveSupport::Concern

  included do
    before_filter :redirect_to_lvh_me
  end

  def redirect_to_lvh_me
    return unless Rails.env.development?
    served_by_lvh_me = !request.env['SERVER_NAME'][/lvh.me$/].nil?
    return if served_by_lvh_me

    http = request.env['rack.url_scheme']
    port = request.env['SERVER_PORT']
    path = request.env['ORIGINAL_FULLPATH']
    redirect_to "#{http}://lvh.me:#{port}#{path}"
  end
end

2. The Rack::Handler

This part was kind of tricky because we have to inject our code before the boot of Rails is triggered, to enforce the binding address localhost to be changed to 0.0.0.0.

After some reading about the rails initialization process and experimenting I noticed that the gems are required (and if so) executed before the Rack::Handler is being called, which will trigger a Ruby server to be executed (WEBrick by default).

While looking at the rack/handler.rb I noticed that the method self.default returns a Ruby server handler. Based on which Ruby server is being used, this will return a different handler.

After inspecting WEBrick’s and Puma’s rack handlers, I noticed, they both have the self.run method with the options argument, containing the Host which indicates the binding address.

Here’s a stipped part of the code I used in the gem, showing how to intercept the used Ruby server (Puma, WEBrick, …) handler and extend that handler, with a custom run method to be able to modify the options

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module Rack
  module Handler
    # first override the self.default, to be able to intercept the handler
    # used by Puma, WEBrick, Thin, ... other?
    class << self
      alias_method :orig_default, :default
    end

    def self.default(options = {})
      # call the original method to return the handler and extend it's self.run method
      orig_default.instance_eval do
        class << self
          alias_method :orig_run, :run
        end

        def self.run(app, options = {})
          env = (options[:environment] || Rails.env)
          # only modify the options[:Host] if environment is development
          # and options[:Host] equals 'localhost'
          if options[:Host] == 'localhost' && env == 'development'
            options.merge!(Host: '0.0.0.0')
          end

          # after modifications, trigger original run method with the new options
          orig_run(app, options)
        end
      end

      # don't forget to return the extended handler
      orig_default
    end
  end
end

Conclusion

After finishing these two pieces, I’ve bundled them into a Gem called local-subdomain, so I don’t have to add the before_filter and add -b 0.0.0.0 to my rails s command.

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