Setup dnsmasq on OS X

dnsmasq OS X.md

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

• Homebrew
• Mountain Lion -> High Sierra

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.

I've had this successfully working a few years ago on yosemite, but recently I realized it fails on sierra.

manually running the dnsmasq binary (instead of loading plist daemon file) helped as it did show the reason why it failed.

brew installation doesn't seem to create /usr/local/var/run/dnsmasq/ dir required for the daemon to run. after creating this dir - it works again.

I have set everything up accordingly, and have the /usr/local/var/run/dnsmasq/dnsmasq.pid with nobody:nobody. Should this be the same user:group as httpd is running?

missing from these instructions is how to have a domain try to resolve thru dnsmasq first, then continue to use the system DNS resolvers next. i'd love to see a recipe on how to configure that!

@ogrrd please add a big note your gist saying that people mustn't use .dev as it's a gTLD.

Thanks everybody for leaving these messages to help people who were caught in this horrifically outdated guide. I feel ashamed that I left it like this for so long to make the internet a more confusing place!

I have removed the contents of this gist now and left the link to what in 2018 seemed to be better.

I want to apologise to anyone who I caused problems for by them following this guide!

@ogrrd please add a big note your gist saying that people mustn't use .dev as it's a gTLD.

Done. 😬

Change of plan. Seeing as this page comes up for searches, I have amended it with purportedly working contents from the fork by @brablc.

The issue is caused by Internet sharing - disable it and port 53 will not be used by mDNSesponder!

scutil --dns shows that DNS queries for specific domains should be routed via the specified nameservers but this is not working
what could be wrong?

using macos big sur
followed everything as directed

And dnsmasq is running:

 $ sudo brew services
Name    Status  User Plist
dnsmasq started root /Library/LaunchDaemons/homebrew.mxcl.dnsmasq.plist

And taking connections?

 $ nmap -p 53 127.0.0.1
PORT   STATE SERVICE
53/tcp open  domain

Whats the significance of the resolver?

Has anyone used dnsmasq to setup a pre-production testing scenario?

For example:

mylivesite.com is on server 1.2.3.4
mylivesite.com is also migrated to a different server with updates on server 2.2.2.2

I can do this in /etc/hosts file easily enough, however I need to make sure subdomains are working, ideally it would be nice to use dnsmasq's wildcard feature that /etc/hosts can't utilize

echo 'address=/.mylivesite.com/2.2.2.2' >> $(brew --prefix)/etc/dnsmasq.conf

Right now, I can't figure out how to do this with dnsmasq, it's routing to the old server (ie 1.2.3.4)

You should not use .dev or .local if you're developing web applications locally. I stumbled across an issue where my Remix SSR Web App was taking 5 seconds or so to make an API request to the API running on my machine.

https://mywebapp.local -> http://myapi.local

The issue was that .local uses mDNS generally which is reserved for multicasting. This was a cause of my long response times. If you're using dnsmasq for local development, please use .lan.

The .test TLD has been officially reserved by the IETF for testing. I don't think this is the case for .lan.

How about .arpa? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.arpa

Thanks, worked great for me!

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

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

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 🎉

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.

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