Don't use localhost:3000, use your own custom domain

After presenting a demo of how an internal tool works, I was flooded with questions. Not about the tool, but about why I had bought a domain just to run the demo. "Why didn't you use the staging server?" they asked. I was confused. I didn't buy a domain. I was running it locally. But instead of the URL being localhost:3002, it was a fully formed domain. www.internaltool.com. In fact, some people told me that they couldn't access the website on their devices. They thought I had to whitelist their IP to grant them access. To feel young again... Setting up a custom domain locally was common practice when I started web programming. But with the advent of Node.js (and rails?), everyone has resorted to just pointing to localhost with an incrementing port number. The main reason is that the webserver is often bundled into the application itself. It’s easy to just run npm start and call it a day. However, if you have multiple long-term projects running locally, especially if they need to…