Why is xip io needed when I can access the IP directly?

Question

xip.io welcome screens says this :

10.0.0.1.xip.io resolves to 10.0.0.1

Why do we need to go through xip io when I can directly use the IP?

Is it used to access servers by domain name instead of IP?

Pituitary

#26166705 and https://mcmap.net/q/504083/-how-configure-homestead-and-xip-io/470749 are interesting questions about xip.io too. – Papyraceous

Answer 1

The main use case is when your application needs to support multiple subdomains.

Take for example these production subdomains:

• www.example.com
• admin.example.com
• members.example.com

Or you can consider a multi-tenant application where each account gets its own custom subdomain:

• mycompany.example.com
• anotherguy.example.com

So it's easy enough to setup a production environment to serve this requests.

But without a service like xip.io for your development environment, you cannot put a subdomain in front of an IP address to route your request appropriately.

To get around this, you can access your application through a subdomain like this through xip.io:

http://mycompany.10.0.0.1.xip.io/

As xip.io states, this then works flawlessly if you're trying to access the application from other machines on your local network, be they smartphones, tablets, other OSes within VMs, etc.

Dariusdarjeeling

Thanks Chris. This, in conjunction with name-based virtual hosting, makes perfect sense. – Pituitary

@Pituitary You're welcome. I suppose it makes sense for virtual hosting if you don't want the extra step of setting up a local DNS mapping to a local site. But I'm finding that the wildcard subdomain is the killer feature. – Dariusdarjeeling

(Especially when considering the need to test on smartphones, etc.) – Dariusdarjeeling

Clears out why WordPress Multisite AMI by Bitnami on AWS does this and not on the simple WP install. – Adeline

If your website refers to its assets via domain name, you will not be able to resolve the urls for those assets and they will trigger 404 and display a broken website – Bonnard