Redirect Addresses to localhost by Pattern on Mac OS X

Question

I'm not even 100% sure how to ask this question. The answer might be out there, but I can't find it.

So I've set up virtual hosts for my Mac and I do all my development locally on my computer. I have a vhost folder in my Sites folder, and I have a list of folders, such as:

recipes.cam
database.cam
sandbox.cam
codeigniter.cam

and in my /etc/hosts file I have an entry for each one:

# vhosts
127.0.0.1 recipes.cam
127.0.0.1 database.cam
127.0.0.1 sandbox.cam
127.0.0.1 codeigniter.cam
# ...    

And this works great. When I go to http://recipes.cam in my browser, it shows the contents of the ~/Sites/vhosts/recipes.cam.

So this is my question: Is there a way to have any address that end in .cam to redirect to localhost? So I don't have to create a new entry in hosts every time I add a new directory (it happens pretty often).

I tried 127.0.0.1 *.cam in my hosts file, but it didn't work :-/

Answer 1

The best solution I've been able to find is DNSMasq.

Justin Carmony's blog post helped me set it up. His original question was more about why .local was so slow after upgrading OSX or something like that, but the solution was the same: DNSMasq.

http://www.justincarmony.com/blog/2011/07/27/mac-os-x-lion-etc-hosts-bugs-and-dns-resolution/

Now, basically all *.cam address go to my local IP. I have it set up so all I have to do is create a folder, list test.cam and I'm off and running with a full LAMP stack.