Setting up a wildcard DNS domain on Mac OS X
There are many ways to develop on a Mac, and many stack to choose from. One common and recurring need however is to access your local websites through a named domain, ie using example.dev. Thankfully, there is a really simple way to do this using Dnsmasq as a local resolver.
Install Dnsmasq
This is straightforward with Homebrew:
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# Install it brew install dnsmasq # Create the etc dir if needed mkdir -p /usr/local/etc # Create a simple configuration # This forces the .dev domain to respond with 127.0.0.1 # You can find more information in the default config file: # /usr/local/opt/dnsmasq/dnsmasq.conf.example echo "address=/.dev/127.0.0.1" > /usr/local/etc/dnsmasq.conf # Install the daemon startup file sudo cp -fv /usr/local/opt/dnsmasq/*.plist \ /Library/LaunchDaemons # Start the daemon sudo launchctl load \ /Library/LaunchDaemons/homebrew.mxcl.dnsmasq.plist |
Configure Mac OS X
All we need to do is tell the resolver to use Dnsmasq for .dev domains:
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# man 5 resolver sudo mkdir -p /etc/resolver sudo sh -c 'echo "nameserver 127.0.0.1" > /etc/resolver/dev' |
You can now use any .dev domain and it will always resolve to 127.0.0.1:
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ping google.com # this still works # PING google.com (74.125.239.38): 56 data bytes ping foo.dev # you can use any domain # PING foo.dev (127.0.0.1): 56 data bytes ping bar.baz.dev # or subdomain # PING foo.dev (127.0.0.1): 56 data bytes |
Conclusion
This is very useful in particular for applications that use subdomains as account identifier: you can easily create new accounts on the fly, and never have to worry about your /etc/hosts file again.
Finally, you may also want to look at Pow (and powder). Pow will automatically start your Rails/Rack applications, and provides a port proxying feature for apps written in other languages. Definitely a great alternative.
That’s it for today.
Cheers!