Show HN: Port Zero – how I learned to stop worrying and love PORT=0
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Show HN: Port Zero – how I learned to stop worrying and love PORT=0.
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Hi HN,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.
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This got me thinking--why on earth are we still using simple numbers to describe which process to connect to?
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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.
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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 When it sees such a process or container, PortZero does this:1.
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