Security
Pogo aims to help you make secure applications, with good default options, high quality tests, and by following web standards.
This document describes some of the security choices made for Pogo. To request an improvement, please file an issue. To report a vulnerability, contact Seth Holladay privately.
The default hostname option is 'localhost'
Pogo has a hostname option that determines which domains and IP addresses the server will listen on for requests after you call server.start(). The default is 'localhost' for security reasons. You may need to set a different hostname value when deploying your app to a hosting provider, depending on their infrastructure (see deployment).
Why does this matter? Sometimes, there is a tradeoff to be had between cnvenience and security.
Generally, during development all you need is for the server to respond to requests from your own machine. That is what the localhost domain (and 127.0.0.1 IP address) is for, it refers to your computer’s loopback interface (i.e. itself). Conversely, the 0.0.0.0 IP address refers to all available addresses, including ones that can be accessed by other machines. As a result, listening on 0.0.0.0 causes the server to be public, whereas localhost does not.
Unfortunately, some other frameworks, and Deno itself, use 0.0.0.0 by default.
The security implications of exposing your development machine to the public internet are significant. In production, you probably do want to expose your app to the public internet, but not necessarily, and doing so by accident is still a serious security risk. Thus, Pogo makes you opt-in explicitly to listening on a public address.