
Smack a Ho.st - A localhost domain - vijaydev
http://tbaggery.com/2010/03/04/smack-a-ho-st.html
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fizx
The nice thing about this, for all of you people who understandably don't get
it, is that setting up wildcard dns on OS X is a royal PITA. You can't just
modify /etc/hosts, you have to
[http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=200511022035208...](http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=2005110220352084)

Given all rails developers use a Mac ;) this is useful.

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MartinMond
Hm, I modify my /etc/hosts all the time and it works as it should.

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slig
I works, but not as simple for using domain wildcards, as he mentioned.

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anotherjesse
I also wildcard *.localhacks.com to 127.0.0.1

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olefoo
Why is this specific to Rails?

The beauty of the web and of the internet protocols it's built on is that you
can have multiple implementations that respond to the same interface. DNS
doesn't care what language it's pointing to.

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danparsonson
It's not specific to Rails, only his example URL is - Rails listens on port
3000 by default. You could equally try
<http://iwishyouwouldnt.smackaho.st:80/> and get your local web server.

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generalk
If you're developing on Rack-based webapps on MacOS, check out
<http://github.com/alloy/passengerpane> \-- it's a System Preferences panel to
automatically sets up local DNS and Apache/Phusion Passenger vhosts for
projects.

If there's a similar tool for non-MacOS or non-Rack stuff I'd love to hear
about it.

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Erwin
Do you need subdomains specificially, or just different addresses that resolve
to localhost? If so you could use e.g <http://127.1:3000/>,
<http://127.2:3000/> etc. (or the full 127.0.0.1 127.0.0.2 if your browser
doesn't like 127.1).

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100k
Having subdomains is nice when you're developing an app that will use
sudomains for accounts in production.

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mikexstudios
*.somesite.com has been around since 2003 and points to 127.0.0.1.

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volomike
My /etc/hosts has:

127.0.0.1 me

So I can do <http://me/website-to-test/>

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jrockway
But if you are developing a site that uses the subdomain as a routing rule,
that fails. Your /etc/hosts entry won't make <http://fuck.me/> go to your
site, which is what smackaho.st _will_ allow you to do.

Obviously this is easy enough to fake without DNS trickery; just modify the
outgoing "Host:" header or teach your proxy how to "resolve" names in the form
of "*.me".

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bruceboughton
Please don't - .me is a popular TLD.

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jrockway
It's the parent's example, not mine.

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blasdel
There's already a totally unambiguous domain for this -- why not alias
*.localhost?

