Configuring subdomains in development with lvh.me

I do a lot of work with subdomains, managing them locally on my development and test machines has always been a bit of a pain. Going way back, I can remember manually editing the hosts file in system32\drivers\etc\ on Windows! On the Unix we have /etc/hosts.

Unfortunately /etc/hosts doesn’t allow wildcard definitions for subdomains, so you have to manually specify each one. For a while I used this simple bash script to append a new domain (or subdomain) to the /etc/hosts file;

This soon became tiresome, with some apps requiring 10’s or 100’s of subdomains to be tested and available locally. So I took to writing a simple rake task that would automatically pull subdomain names from an applications database and append them to my local /etc/hosts file (here’s that script).

Time passed and my script worked well, but had a some disadvantages. I had to re-run it every-time my subdomain data changed, and across apps it required modified since I had different ways and means of defining subdomain sites.

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