Wildcards in a Windows hosts file

Question

I want to setup my local development machine so that any requests for *.local are redirected to localhost. The idea is that as I develop multiple sites, I can just add vhosts to Apache called site1.local, site2.local etc, and have them all resolve to localhost, while Apache serves a different site accordingly.

I am on Windows XP.

I tried adding

127.0.0.1       *.local

to my c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts file, also tried:

127.0.0.1       .local

Neither of which seem to work.

I know I can set them up on different port numbers, but that is a pain since it is hard to remember which port is which.

I don't want to have to setup a local DNS server or anything hard, any suggestions?

Answer 1

Acrylic DNS Proxy (free, open source) does the job. It creates a proxy DNS server (on your own computer) with its own hosts file. The hosts file accepts wildcards.

Download from the offical website

http://mayakron.altervista.org/support/browse.php?path=Acrylic&name=Home

Configuring Acrylic DNS Proxy

To configure Acrylic DNS Proxy, install it from the above link then go to:

1. Start
2. Programs
3. Acrylic DNS Proxy
4. Config
5. Edit Custom Hosts File (AcrylicHosts.txt)

Add the folowing lines on the end of the file:

127.0.0.1   *.localhost
127.0.0.1   *.local
127.0.0.1   *.lc

Restart the Acrylic DNS Proxy service:

1. Start
2. Programs
3. Acrilic DNS Proxy
4. Config
5. Restart Acrylic Service

You will also need to adjust your DNS setting in you network interface settings:

1. Start
2. Control Panel
3. Network and Internet
4. Network Connections
5. Local Area Connection Properties
6. TCP/IPv4

Set "Use the following DNS server address":

Preferred DNS Server: 127.0.0.1

If you then combine this answer with jeremyasnyder's answer (using VirtualDocumentRoot) you can then automatically setup domains/virtual hosts by simply creating a directory.