A Place In The Sun

Setting Up A Place In The Sun for Local Web Development

I spent about six months trying to get my local development environment to actually feel production-like before I ran into A Place In The Sun. The short version: it is a browser-based development and testing workspace that lets you spin up preview environments for frontend projects without pushing code to a public URL. The long version is that I wasted weeks chasing SSL certificate errors, CORS issues, and proxy misconfigurations on my own setup. A Place In The Sun is primarily a local server wrapper with an integrated tunneling layer. You point it at a directory, it starts a dev server, generates a temporary HTTPS endpoint, and exposes it to the internet for a set window of time. That is it. No database management, no CI integration, no hosting. Just a preview link you can share with someone who needs to see what your project looks like right now. The tool is most useful when you are doing frontend work and need to send a non-developer a working link. Email clients block iframe previews of localhost. Your client cannot open a tunnel on their machine. This solves that by giving them a real HTTPS URL for a few hours.

Installation and First Run

Download the package from the official site, which at time of writing is at aplaceinthesun.dev. Install the command-line tool, then authenticate with your account credentials. The setup takes roughly three minutes on a standard Mac or Linux machine. On Windows, I ran into a PowerShell execution policy issue on my first attempt. The fix was running Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned -Scope CurrentUser before the installer would proceed. I found that documented in the GitHub issues after I spent twenty minutes confused. Once installed, the basic command is straightforward: apits serve ./my-project --port 3000

This starts the dev server on port 3000 and generates a temporary URL. The default expiry is two hours. You can extend it to twenty-four hours with the --duration 24h flag if you need to keep it up longer for a client review cycle.

The Tunneling Layer and What Goes Wrong

Here is where people hit problems. The tunneling service routes your local traffic through a relay server. If your project makes API calls to a backend running on a different local port, the tunnel does not automatically forward those requests. I learned this the hard way when my React app could load but every fetch call to localhost:8080/api returned a connection refused error from the tunnel. The workaround is to either run your backend through the same serve command or configure a proxy rule in your project. I use a simple package.json script that chains both services: "dev:all": "concurrently \"npm run api\" \"apits serve ./client --proxy http://localhost:8080\""

This proxies all unmatched requests to your API server while the tunnel serves the frontend. It works for most single-page applications. It does not work for WebSocket connections unless you configure them explicitly with the --websocket flag on the serve command.

SSL and Certificate Behavior

The platform handles TLS termination at the tunnel layer, which means your local server can run on plain HTTP and the generated URL still gets a valid certificate. This avoids the whole self-signed certificate headache that usually comes with local tunneling tools. One thing to note: if your project embeds assets using absolute paths starting with https://, those requests will bypass the tunnel entirely and hit the real internet. I caught this when an image path in my CSS broke because I had hardcoded a CDN URL during development and forgot to change it back. The free tier gives you one concurrent tunnel with a two-hour expiry and 500MB of bandwidth. For individual developers doing occasional client demos, this is usually enough. The paid tier starts at about ten dollars a month and increases the bandwidth cap and concurrent tunnel limit. There is no team sharing feature, so if multiple people on your project need active previews simultaneously, you will need separate accounts or you will kick each other off. It also does not support server-rendered applications well. If your project uses Node.js Express or similar to render pages server-side, the tunnel can forward requests, but session state and server-side routing may behave unpredictably under the relay. I tried running a Next.js SSR project through it once and got intermittent 502 errors when the tunnel’s idle timeout kicked in during longer page loads. Static site generators work fine though. I use it regularly with Astro builds without any issues.

When Not to Use It

If you need persistent URLs, database connectivity, file uploads, or mobile device testing, this is not the right tool. It is a preview link generator, nothing more. For mobile testing, I pair it with BrowserStack’s mobile view mode, which can open the generated URL on real devices. That combination covers most of what I need without overcomplicating my workflow. One more thing nobody mentions: the tunnel URLs are not searchable or indexable, which is the point, but if you accidentally leave one public for the full duration and someone scrubs it, that URL is gone forever. There is no way to recover it or change the slug. I once had a client bookmark a link that expired and then I had to regenerate and reshare it five minutes before a meeting. Plan ahead.