Lately I have found myself doing a *lot* of development against external APIs, several of which require those services to be able to access my dev site directly. Traditionally, I've set up my dev sites on a public server (usually my personal VPS), mirrored the site locally, and used [rsync](http://www.samba.org/rsync/) to push incremental changes from my local machine to the server.
1. It means I have an extra step (to rsync) after each change. Yes, it's the same command over and over, but it gets repetitive. Also, if I forget, I spend a few minutes trying to figure out why the change I just made doesn't appear.
1. I'm also left with old dev sites (that I generally forget about) out on the public web - generally not getting proper attention for security updates, etc. This leaves my VPS open to attack.
I also spend a *lot* of time tweaking my local environment to be just-how-I-like-it(tm).
Recently, I had an idea that, in hindsight, seems obvious. However, in talking with a few people, it seemed just novel enough to warrant the high bar of intellect that is a blog post. So here is the magic:
### What you need:
* A wildcard DNS entry (i.e. `*.home.example.com`). I'm lucky that my [home ISP](http://teksavvy.com/) allows me to have a static IP address, but a [DynDNS](http://www.dyndns.com/) or similar account would also work.
* A linux/mac computer attached to your home/office network that is *not* currently running a web server (i.e. port 80 is unused) - preferably connected via ethernet. I happen to have an old mac mini that serves as my "media server" at home that I'm using.
* Ports 22 and 80 forwarded from your router to the aforementioned computer. (This is left as an exercise to the reader).
### The "magic":
Given the above, the rest is really quite simple (and perhaps obvious to some). A simple ssh port forward does the trick. Here's the command I use:
Voila! Now all requests to home.example.com will come to my local server and I can setup vhosts, etc accordingly. Also, if I just end my ssh connection, I no longer have to worry about the big, scary Internet accessing my dev sites.
### TODO
I'm not 100% happy about allowing root ssh into my home network, so I may spend a rainy Sunday afternoon and setup an HTTP proxy at home that forwards to something like 8080 on localhost (and perhaps gives a nice "we're not home" message if I'm not ssh'ed in). That way, I wouldn't need to ssh in as root (which is necessary to bind the "low number" port).
If you do much tinkering with remote services (particularly OAuth-based services or webhooks, etc.), I hope this makes life just a little bit easier for you.
