After following all the steps to setup Sitecore Habitat on a local machine, there are 2 site root items in the \sitecore\Content\ node of the Sitecore content tree: Habitat and Demo.

Habitat and Demo site root items

The Habitat item loads fine at http://habitat.local/

The Demo item is served by the demo website which uses the demo.habitat.local hostname:

<site name="demo" hostName="demo.habitat.local" rootPath="/sitecore/content/demo" ... />

However, loading http://demo.habitat.local/ is failing because of DNS entry not found for that domain. This is because the Sitecore installer only created a hosts file entry and an IIS binding to Habitat.local. To fix that, two things are needed:

  1. A hosts file entry for demo.habitat.local:

    # C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts

127.0.0.1 Habitat.local
127.0.0.1 demo.Habitat.local

  2. An IIS binding for demo.habitat.local:

    1. In IIS Manager, right-click on the Habitat.local website Habitat.local website in IIS and select “Edit Bindings…”.

      demo.Habitat.local page

    2. Click the “Add…” button.

    3. Enter “demo.Habitat.local” in the “Host name” field.

      demo.Habitat.local page

    4. Click the “OK” buton.

      demo.Habitat.local page

    5. Click the “Close” button.

The http://demo.habitat.local/ should now load as expected. A Google search page should be displayed because this site’s utility is to provide a demo script starting point.

The \src\Feature\Demo\specs\Mockup of External page.feature Specflow file of the Habitat repository explains the utility of the page:

Feature: Mockup of External page

In order to start a demo story from an external page
As a technical presales consultant
I want to be able to show a mockup of an external page, e.g. search engine page with adword links to a campaign on the website