Novus makes it easy to manage multiple localhost services by letting you use real domain names instead.
No more dealing with hard-to-remember ports or editing /etc/hosts — just smooth, production-like development on your machine.

Under the hood it’s just good old Nginx acting as a proxy and DNSMasq for resolving custom domains. SSL certificates are automatically managed and renewed by mkcert.

All you need to do is map your localhost URLs to domain names - Novus takes care of the rest.

Enjoy hassle-free development with fully secured, real-world URLs! 🎯

How to install

Novus can be installed via Homebrew in two steps:

$ brew tap jozefcipa/novus
$ brew install novus

After that, you can verify if Novus has been installed properly:

$ novus -v

Update Novus

If you are already using Novus, you can update it by running:

$ brew update
$ brew upgrade novus

How to use

To start using Novus, run novus init to install the dependencies and create a configuration file.

Next, open novus.yml in your editor to define your domain mapping.

Example configuration:

appName: my-app
routes:
  - domain: my-frontend.test
    upstream: http://localhost:3000
  - domain: my-api.test
    upstream: http://localhost:4000

Once you’re done, call novus serve and you can use nice HTTPS domains locally 🎉.

💡 If you want to define only one URL, you can also do this by passing it directly to the novus serve command.
👉 (e.g. novus serve my-api.test http://localhost:3000)

🔒 Novus will ask for your sudo password (for managing DNS resolvers). If you do not want to type a password every time, run novus trust.

Commands

Here is the list of all available commands.
You can run them by calling novus [command]

Command	Description
init	Initializes the Novus proxy. Installs the necessary binaries and creates a configuration file (novus.yml)
serve [domain?] [upstream?]	Reads the configuration file, updates DNS, creates SSL certificates and registers routes. Note: You can also quickly define one route by providing the configuration directly in the CLI by calling e.g. novus serve my-api.test http://localhost:3000
status	Shows Novus status and all registered apps.
stop	Disables routing by stopping Nginx and DNSMasq
start	Starts routing by starting Nginx and DNSMasq
pause [app]	Pauses routing of a specific app. Needed if there are multiple apps defined with conflicting domains
resume [app]	Starts routing the paused app again.
remove [app|domain]	Removes an app configuration from Novus and stops routing.
trust [--revoke?]	Creates a sudoers record so Novus won't ask for sudo password.

Notes

💡 Prefer .test or another postfix that is not a valid TLD domain.
❌ Do not use .local domain as it might be used by MacOS.
❌ Do not use .dev domain either, this is now a valid TLD domain.

Contributing

You're more than welcome to contribute to this project! 💙

If you have an idea, miss a specific feature or you found a bug, feel free to report it or fix it yourself.

If you want to play around, but don't have anything specific, check the Issues page and choose one of the open issues 🙌.

License

Novus is released under the MIT license.