When building Laravel apps locally with Laravel Herd, you get a seamless development experience using .test domains. But if you’ve ever tried implementing social authentication — like “Login with GitHub” or “Sign in with Google” — you’ve likely hit a frustrating wall:
Many OAuth providers don’t accept .test domains for callback URLs.
That’s because .test isn’t a public top-level domain, and social platforms like GitHub, Google, and Apple typically require real, publicly accessible URLs for their OAuth flows.
To help with this, the Herd team just created a web service named fwd.host that acts as a proxy for your redirects and does not store any data. You can use this service to handle social authentication callbacks by setting your callback URLs to:
https://fwd.host/http://your-herd-site.test/auth/callback
The social authentication provider will redirect to the domain fwd.host, which will then forward the request to your Herd site.
Of course, if you need something fancier with a lot more options, check out Expose.
