This is common, but sadly has always been incorrect.

.test is the TLD you want, specified by RFC2606.

This seems like one of those anti-patterns that has been passed down by blog posts and from engineer-to-engineer. I've seen this in almost every single developer team I've been apart of.

Either way, like you said, people should be using .test so you don't have to worry about future collisions.

It literally happened to me yesterday, setting up a VM and aliasing it to a .dev domain for local testing. Took me an hour to figure out what was wrong =/

I doubt they'll buy .local.

https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/14802/if-someon...

But generally speaking a subdomain on a domain you really own seems like a better idea.

https://serverfault.com/questions/17255/top-level-domain-dom...

I guarantee you that ICANN will never allocate .local because the risk of collision is too high. They've already made that determination for .corp, .mail, and .home: https://www.icann.org/resources/board-material/resolutions-2...

.home is used more than .dev? I find that hard to believe.

I’ve literally never ever seen any .home until now.

It's commonly used by routers.