It's been a while since we talked about Anvil, so alongside a nice new website refresh we thought we'd update you on the latest features we've added and our plans for Anvil later this year.

xip.io support

xip.io is a fantastic service by 37Signals for sharing development sites over the local network. By running a clever custom DNS server, they redirect *.192.168.1.2.xip.io to 192.168.1.2 - so you can share your sites over your local network as site-name.your-ip.xip.io.

Fortunately, Anvil now makes this super-duper easy. Just right-click a site and copy the URL to your clipboard, ready for sharing across the local network.

The future

In the past few months we've paused on developing Anvil to support our other app: Hammer. Hammer is a great app for building out static sites, and Anvil is great for hosting them locally!

As their names suggest, Hammer and Anvil make a super-powerful combination when working with static HTML sites. If you're using Typekit, or widgets that require an http:// URL schema, Anvil is the best way to get them working locally on a .dev URL.

We're planning a set of updates that should bring Anvil and Hammer closer together, and make your life a breeze. So stay tuned for more news!