Link parkin’ a GitHub gist, because it leads to some fun pure local configuration and I can’t quite find anything similar in a web page or blog post.
The rub is that you can configure macOS DNS to direct resolution of domains by
doing a bit of file tweaking in /etc/resolver. For example, .test
by adding an entry in /etc/resolver/test that points to 127.0.0.1
for a DNS nameserver. Then if you install and
configure dnsmasqn to listen for DNS requests on your machine, it can take over the resolution of
a domain and point entries to services anywhere, but your machine in
particular. This includes wildcarding subdomains. A tricky bit is
closely reading the dnsmasq docs on the --address option and knowing
you can use that in a dnsmasq.conf file.
What’s this good for? I used it when working with Dokku which
allocates subdomains under a root domain for services it dynamically
builds and creates. Configured to use .test as
its root, all the services resolved nicely thanks to dnsmasq
pointing back to my laptop. This makes local experimentation and
demonstration of “push to deploy”, PaaS services easy, fun, and
portable. YMMV.
Of note, there’s a new(ish) PaaS on the block that I’d like to try out: coolify