.dev Domains Not Resolving

For the last year I’ve been unable to view any .dev domains on my computer. The problem was simple, but it took me a long time to figure out what it was.

As soon as Google started selling domains on the .dev TLD developers started snapping them up and using them for their websites, blogs, and other projects.

Strangely though, I found I couldn’t see any of them.

Whenever I would click through to a website on a .dev domain it wouldn’t resolve and I’d get a blank white screen in my browser.

At first I chalked it up to the website being down or an issue with my ISP and ignored it, but after being unable to follow a dozen links to .dev domains over the span of a month, eventually it became clear the issue was something on my end.

I did the usual incantantions I could think of. I tried dig, but nothing seemed to be wrong. I tried ping and traceroute, which both hung, indicating something was wrong, but also returned no information I could use to narrow down the issue.

I searched around online but couldn’t find anyone with a similar problem and gave up. Every time I’d get linked to a .dev domain I’d repeat this process, spending a few minutes trying different searches. Finally, nearly a year later I found an unrelated problem that tipped me off as to what mine might be.

The problem was Pow. That’s right, the swanky development server from about six years ago.

You might still be using Pow, but more likely you haven’t used it in years and completely forgot about it. I certainly had.

Unfortunately, I didn’t uninstall Pow properly and its resolvers were still hanging around, routing all requests for .dev and .test into a black hole.

❯ ls /etc/resolver/
dev  test

🤦🏼‍♂️

❯ sudo rm /etc/resolver/dev
❯ sudo rm /etc/resolver/test

Delete the resolver files and you should be good to go ✌🏼