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Setup dnsmasq on OS X

Never touch your local /etc/hosts file in OS X again

To setup your computer to work with *.test domains, e.g. project.test, awesome.test and so on, without having to add to your hosts file each time.

Requirements

Install

brew install dnsmasq

Setup

Create config directory

mkdir -pv $(brew --prefix)/etc/

Setup *.test

echo 'address=/.test/127.0.0.1' >> $(brew --prefix)/etc/dnsmasq.conf

Change port for High Sierra

echo 'port=53' >> $(brew --prefix)/etc/dnsmasq.conf

Autostart - now and after reboot

sudo brew services start dnsmasq

Add to resolvers

Create resolver directory

sudo mkdir -v /etc/resolver

Add your nameserver to resolvers

sudo bash -c 'echo "nameserver 127.0.0.1" > /etc/resolver/test'

Finished

That's it! You can run scutil --dns to show all of your current resolvers, and you should see that all requests for a domain ending in .test will go to the DNS server at 127.0.0.1

N.B. never use .dev as a TLD for local dev work. .test is fine though.

@capaj
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capaj commented Nov 24, 2023

@imkonsowa are you on sonoma? I followed all the commands and I still don't get .test to resolve to my localhost

@imkonsowa
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@capaj Yes I'm on sonoma, have you configured a webserver to listen and proxy traffic for a .test host?

@mavogel
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mavogel commented Dec 12, 2023

Setup MacOS Sonoma networking for the .hack TLD. Including this resource I read

  1. https://mjpitz.com/blog/2020/10/21/local-ingress-domains-kind/
  2. https://allanphilipbarku.medium.com/setup-automatic-local-domains-with-dnsmasq-on-macos-ventura-b4cd460d8cb3

and concluded the setup for k8s kind, but it also worked to a local nginx webserver running on port 8088

setup

brew install kubernetes-cli dnsmasq
# to keep it dry
export LOCAL_CUSTOM_TLD="hack"
# register .hack TLD locally
echo "address=/.${LOCAL_CUSTOM_TLD}/127.0.0.1" >> $(brew --prefix)/etc/dnsmasq.conf
# configure the local resolver
sudo mkdir /etc/resolver/
cat <<EOF | sudo tee /etc/resolver/${LOCAL_CUSTOM_TLD}
nameserver 127.0.0.1
EOF
# restart local dnsmasq service
sudo brew services restart dnsmasq
# restart mDNSResponder
sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder
# verify the new resolver was picked up
scutil --dns
# ... should show $LOCAL_CUSTOM_TLD
resolver #8
  domain   : hack # <- 
  nameserver[0] : 127.0.0.1
  flags    : Request A records, Request AAAA records
  reach    : 0x00030002 (Reachable,Local Address,Directly Reachable Address)

test it with a subdomain of .hack

ping -c 1 nginx.random.${LOCAL_CUSTOM_TLD}
# ...
PING nginx.random.hack (127.0.0.1): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=0.052 ms

--- nginx.random.hack ping statistics ---
1 packets transmitted, 1 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 0.052/0.052/0.052/0.000 ms

run a local docker container on port 8088 to test it

docker run --rm -p8088:80 --name nginx -d nginx
# test it
curl -I nginx.random.hack:8088

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx/1.25.3
Date: Tue, 12 Dec 2023 12:24:58 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 615
Last-Modified: Tue, 24 Oct 2023 13:46:47 GMT
Connection: keep-alive
ETag: "6537cac7-267"
Accept-Ranges: bytes

# remove it
docker stop nginx

HTH sb 🎉

@brablc
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brablc commented Dec 12, 2023

For my personal project I solved this by making my LAN IP static in DHCP server and adding *.lan.mydomain.com wildcard A record to this IP. The advantage is that I can test on mobile devices easily - livereload working like magic on multiple devices. When on the road I use *.lh.mydomain.com A 127.0.0.1 instead.

@datlife
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datlife commented Jan 10, 2024

If you are running into issue why dig or nslookup still doesn't work with your domain. It turns out they don't use the official system resolver on Mac OS (ref: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50914268/os-x-etc-resolver-dev-isnt-working-why-not )

Therefore, to test a domain . Use this

dscacheutil -q host -a name argocd.ml-dev.test

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