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.

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