Choosing Domain Names and IPs for Documentation #

When writing documentation it is a good practice to not use public/valid domain names or IP addresses. The RFC documents listed below provide domains and ips that can be used for examples or documentation purposes.

Domains #

Domains reserved for documentation are described in

• RFC2606 - Reserved Top Level DNS Names
• RFC6761 - Special-Use Domain Names.

Top level domain names reserved for documentation:

.test       // for testing
.example    // for examples
.invalid    // obviously for invalid domain names
.localhost  // only pointing to the loop back IP address

Second level domain names reserved for documentation:

example.com
example.net
example.org

IPv4 #

IPv4 addresses reserved for documentation are described in

• RFC1918 - Address Allocation for Private Internets
• RFC6598 - IANA-Reserved IPv4 Prefix for Shared Address Space
• RFC6890 - Special-Purpose IP Address Registries
• RFC8190 - Updates to the Special-Purpose IP Address Registries

and obsolete

• RFC3330 - Special-Use IPv4 Addresses
• RFC5735 - Special Use IPv4 Addresses

IPv4 documentation only network block is

192.0.2.0/24

Address space:

10.0.0.0    - 10.255.255.255  (10/8 prefix)
172.16.0.0  - 172.31.255.255  (172.16/12 prefix)
192.168.0.0 - 192.168.255.255 (192.168/16 prefix)

IPv6 #

IPv6 addresses reserved for documentation are described in

• RFC3849 - IPv6 Address Prefix Reserved for Documentation.

IPv4 documentation only network block is

2001:DB8::/32