I actually tried /etc/hosts but still having the same error due to CSP. I’d have thought that there is a flag or setting that can be used to toggle this to enable the developers to do everything within their laptop without having to stand up a DNS solution. Looking at the Install Discourse on macOS for development - documentation / developers - Discourse Meta it appears to bootstrap into something that works with http://localhost:3000 rather than an IP.
The challenge I have is I have automation to install Discourse and want to use the same process to stand up both development, UAT, and production environments and I don’t necessarily want to have the development environment accessible from the public Internet, which appears to be a requirement atm because it needs to resolve a proper FQDN. There are multiple use cases one of which is for eg automating the upgrade of Discourse in development environment every week and run a number of tests to see if anything breaks.
Anyway if there is a way of relaxing the requirement to allow direct access via IP it’d be good to know. Otherwise I guess the only other solution is to get a small DNS service going and then point the laptop to use the custom DNS service but it seems to be a bit of a hassle.