hotel

Start apps from your browser and get local domains in seconds!

Tip: if you don't enable local domains, hotel can still be used as a catalog of local servers.

Hotel works great on any OS (OS X, Linux, Windows) and with all servers ❤️

• Node (Express, Webpack)
• PHP (Laravel, Symfony)
• Ruby (Rails, Sinatra, Jekyll)
• Python (Django)
• Docker
• Go
• Apache, Nginx
• ...

Sponsorship

Development of Hotel is generously supported by contributions from people. If you are benefiting from my projects and would like to help keep them financially sustainable, please visit Patreon.

Video

• Starting apps with Hotel - Spacedojo Code Kata by Josh Owens

Features

• Local domains - http://project.dev
• HTTPS via self-signed certificate - https://project.dev
• Wildcard subdomains - http://*.project.dev
• Works everywhere - OS X, Linux and Windows
• Works with any server - Node, Ruby, PHP, ...
• Proxy - Map local domains to remote servers
• System-friendly - No messing with port 80, /etc/hosts, sudo or additional software
• Fallback URL - http://localhost:2000/project
• Servers are only started when you access them
• Plays nice with other servers (Apache, Nginx, ...)
• Random or fixed ports

Install

npm install -g hotel && hotel start

Hotel requires Node to be installed, if you don't have it, you can simply install it using one of the following method:

• https://github.com/creationix/nvm nvm install stable
• https://brew.sh brew install node

You can also visit https://nodejs.org.

Quick start

Local dev domains (optional)

To use local .dev domains, you need to configure your network or browser to use hotel's proxy auto-config file or you can skip this step for the moment and go directly to http://localhost:2000

See instructions here.

Servers

Add your servers commands

~/projects/one$ hotel add nodemon
~/projects/two$ hotel add 'serve -p $PORT'

Go to localhost:2000 or hotel.dev.

Alternatively you can directly go to

http://localhost:2000/one
http://localhost:2000/two

http://one.dev
http://two.dev

https://one.dev
https://two.dev

Tip you can also use hotel run <cmd> to start your server in the terminal and get a temporary local domain.

Popular servers examples

Using other servers? Here are some examples to get you started :)

hotel add 'ember server'                               # Ember
hotel add 'jekyll serve --port $PORT'                  # Jekyll
hotel add 'rails server -p $PORT -b 127.0.0.1'         # Rails
hotel add 'python -m SimpleHTTPServer $PORT'           # static file server (Python)
hotel add 'php -S 127.0.0.1:$PORT'                     # PHP
hotel add 'docker-compose up'                          # docker-compose
hotel add 'python manage.py runserver 127.0.0.1:$PORT' # Django
# ...

On Windows use "%PORT%" instead of '$PORT'

See a Docker example here..

Proxy

Add your remote servers

~$ hotel add http://some-domain.com --name local-domain 
~$ hotel add http://192.168.1.12:1337 --name aliased-address

You can now access them using

http://local-domain.dev # will proxy requests to http://some-domain.com
http://aliased-address.dev # will proxy requests to http://192.168.1.12:1337

CLI usage and options

hotel add <cmd|url> [opts]
hotel run <cmd> [opts]

# Examples

hotel add 'nodemon app.js' --out dev.log  # Set output file (default: none)
hotel add 'nodemon app.js' --name name    # Set custom name (default: current dir name)
hotel add 'nodemon app.js' --port 3000    # Set a fixed port (default: random port)
hotel add 'nodemon app.js' --env PATH     # Store PATH environment variable in server config
hotel add http://192.168.1.10 --name app  # map local domain to URL

hotel run 'nodemon app.js'                # Run server and get a temporary local domain

# Other commands

hotel ls     # List servers
hotel rm     # Remove server
hotel start  # Start hotel daemon
hotel stop   # Stop hotel daemon

To get help

hotel --help
hotel --help <cmd>

Port

For hotel to work, your servers need to listen on the PORT environment variable. Here are some examples showing how you can do it from your code or the command-line:

var port = process.env.PORT || 3000
server.listen(port)

hotel add 'cmd -p $PORT'  # OS X, Linux
hotel add "cmd -p %PORT%" # Windows

Fallback URL

If you're offline or can't configure your browser to use .dev domains, you can always access your local servers by going to localhost:2000.

Configurations and logs

~/.hotel contains daemon logs, servers and daemon configurations.

~/.hotel/conf.json
~/.hotel/daemon.log
~/.hotel/daemon.pid
~/.hotel/servers/<app-name>.json

By default, hotel uses the following configuration values:

{
  "port": 2000,
  "host": '127.0.0.1',
  "timeout": 5000,
  "tld": 'dev',
  "proxy": false
}

You can override them in ~/.hotel/conf.json.

Third-party tools

• Hotel Clerk OS X menubar
• HotelX Another OS X menubar (only 1.6MB)
• alfred-hotel Alfred 3 workflow
• Hotel Manager Gnome Shell extension

FAQ

Seting a fixed port

hotel add --port 3000 'server-cmd $PORT' 

Adding X-Forwarded-* headers to requests

hotel add --xfwd 'server-cmd'

Setting HTTP_PROXY env

Use --http-proxy-env flag when adding your server or edit your server configuration in ~/.hotel/servers

hotel add --http-proxy-env 'server-cmd'

Proxying requests to a remote https server

hotel add --change-origin 'https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com'

When proxying to a https server, you may get an error because your local .dev domain doesn't match the host defined in the server certificate. With this flag, host header is changed to match the target URL.

ENOSPC and EACCES errors

If you're seeing one of these errors in ~/.hotel/daemon.log, this usually means that there's some permissions issues. hotel daemon should be started without sudo and ~/.hotel should belong to $USER.

# to fix permissions
sudo chown -R $USER: $HOME/.hotel

See also, https://docs.npmjs.com/getting-started/fixing-npm-permissions

Configuring a network proxy IP

If you're behind a corporate proxy, replace "proxy" with your network proxy IP in ~/.hotel/conf.json. For example:

{
  "proxy": "1.2.3.4:5000"
}

License

MIT - Typicode 🌵