For some time now I’ve been using subdomains in XAMPP, here on my own Win10 PC, for a few of my test sites. It obviously makes things much more realistic when testing functionality.
What I didn’t realise until recently, though, was how much easier this can be made by implementing wildcard subdomains. Any folder inside the web document root is automatically available as a subdomain. You just open a browser to ‘foldername.localhost’ and it’s done.
Not sure why I did, but I chanced upon http://www.sintesisdigital.com.mx/dashboard/docs/configure-wildcard-subdomains.html which gives all the details of how to achieve this.
Incidentally, I found that I didn’t even need to update the hosts file, and while I’d have been OK with doing that, it saves even more time.