TLDR: the story is about a constellation that is seven sisters, but one is hiding; and that constellation does indeed have seven stars, but one hasn't been visible for 100k years.

But at a larger level this tool just makes everything work so smoothly. If you have two services with the same name, it pops up a notification in the tray. If you start a new process with a different name, you don't have to configure SRV; the DNS just becomes available automatically. HTTPS is auto configured. That sort of thing.

I think somebody could one day make something like this that was based on SRV, but it would still need all those niceties to make it work well for developers.

Recently I wasted several hours wrangling my dev environment only to find out that the browser frontend was talking to the wrong version of the backend. This got me thinking--why on earth are we still using simple numbers to describe which process to connect to? Why not use names instead? I thought of all the times a program wouldn't start because of port conflicts. The more I thought about it, the crazier it seemed.

Modern operating systems already offer no-conflict ports: if you make your TCP server listen on port 0, the OS assigns you a random available port. But that only solves half the problem.

I built the other half: PortZero. It's a GPLv3 program that watches for processes (and docker containers!) with a special PZ_TUNNEL environment variable:

  PZ_TUNNEL=myapp-{branch}.portzero.local:80 npm run dev

1. Create a virtual NIC (if it hasn't already)

2. Create a new virtual IP address

3. Create a DNS record that substitutes things like {branch} based on the working directory of the process, and points at that virtual IP address

4. Start listening on that virtual IP address on the port of your choice (e.g. port 80 for http, port 443 for https, port 5432 for postgresql)

5. Forward any TCP connections to that virtual IP address / virtual port to the random, OS-assigned port that your process or container is actually listening on

The result is you don't have to think about ports anymore, you just have to think about subdomains. You can have multiple services available on port 80 without conflicts, as long as they have different portzero.local subdomains.

It does some other cool stuff like:

- Enable HTTPS on local HTTP services by creating a local CA and registering it on your machine

- Enable cloud tunnels so you can access your apps on other devices (paid feature)

Links:

https://portzero.net/docs/

https://github.com/PortZeroNetwork/portzero

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49063648

Points: 19

# Comments: 20

- you shouldn’t have sex with relatives

- you shouldn’t chop your dick off

The emergency room doctors sewed it back on. Not sure what to think about that.

“Auntie, it’s me! N*** k** f**! X is really a man! ** did 9/11!”

“Oh it really is you Johnny!”

We’re all going to have to start communicating this way. Best of luck.

I offer consulting services on the side to help professionals hone these skills. $250 / hour.

This makes complex dashboards so much easier to build, because in Python you have to test everything in the dashboard to make sure a change to a common dataset didn’t break anything.

Is there a good web dashboard library like streamlit for Haskell I wonder?

> Pretty much all UI can be modeled as a tree–or more abstractly as a graph. A tree is a natural way to model UI: it makes it easy to compose different components together to build something that is visually complicated. It’s also been one of most common ways to model UI programming since at least the existence of HTML, if not earlier.

> UI in Rust is difficult because it's hard to share data across this component tree without inheritance. Additionally, in a normal UI framework there are all sorts of spots where you need to mutate the element tree, but because of Rust’s mutability rules, this "alter the tree however you want" approach doesn't work.[1]

[1] https://www.warp.dev/blog/why-is-building-a-ui-in-rust-so-ha...