Overview

Novus streamlines managing of numerous localhost services by providing a simple way to define regular domain names instead. It comes with built-in HTTPS support so all domains are secure by default.

In the background it’s just good old Nginx acting as a proxy and DNSMasq for defining custom domain resolvers. No more /etc/hosts manipulation. SSL certificates are automatically managed and renewed for you by mkcert.

All you have to do is map your localhost URLs to the DNS domains. The rest is up to Novus and you can enjoy a seamless production-like experience on your machine 💯.

Installing

Installing Novus is very simple and can be done in two steps.

$ brew tap jozefcipa/novus
$ brew install novus

You can verify Novus has been install by running

$ novus -v

Usage

To start using Novus, run novus init.

It creates a novus.yml configuration file that you can open in your editor and define your domains mapping.

Example configuration:

appName: my-app
routes:
  - domain: my-frontend.test
    upstream: http://localhost:3000
  - domain: my-api.test
    upstream: http://localhost:4000

Once you’re done, just call novus serve and you can start using nice HTTPs domains locally.

Note: It will ask for your password as it performs some sudo calls (for managing DNS resolvers).

Commands

Here is the list of all available commands.
You can run them by calling novus [command]

Command	Description
init	Initializes the Novus proxy. Install the necessary binaries and creates a configuration file (novus.yml)
serve	Reads the configuration file, updates DNS, creates SSL certificates and registers routes.
status	Shows Novus status and all registered apps.
stop	Stops Novus routing.
pause [app]	Pauses routing of a specific app. (Needed if there are multiple apps defined with the conflicting domains)
resume [app]	Starts routing the paused app again.
remove [app]	Removes app configuration from Novus and stops routing.

Notes

💡 Prefer .test or any other postfix that is not a TLD domain

❌ Do not use top level domains (TLD) defined by IANA
👉 This will result in redirecting all URLs using the given TLD to localhost e.g. my.local.website.com -> all *.com websites will stop working (!)

❌ MacOS doesn't work well with .local TLDs. See Apple article for more.

❌ Do not use .dev domain either, this is now a valid TLD domain

License

Novus is released under the MIT license. See LICENSE.