wildcard Subdomain for localhost ubuntu 8.04

Question

I'm using ubuntu 8.04 and apache2, for my development I need a wildcard sub domains.

for example If I go to abc.localhost/ it should redirect to localhost/

Can you guys help me out how I can achieve this in ubuntu 8.04.

thank you.

Answer 1

Well I Configured it after so much RnD I was not able to use /etc/hosts file because I wanted a wildcard subdomain.
- Installed dnsmasq and created a virtual domain example.com
in /etc/dnsmasq.conf file added these lines

address=/example.com/192.168.0.2
listen-address=192.168.0.1  

• added 192.168.0.1 as nameserver in resolv.conf

here 192.168.0.2 is my machine and 192.168.0.1 is dns server

Answer 2

It's perfectly doable, however you need at least one of the following:

• The ability to add a record into your DNS server.
• The ability to have your DNS admin to add a record for you.
• Root on your system.

If it isn't possible to add a record to your existing DNS server, but you have root on your system, then you should:

1. Install Bind
2. Configure forwarders to pass unhandled queries onto your existing DNS servers.
3. Add wildcard entries for your domain to your bind configuration.

Configure Apache to use a default virtual host.

This link should help.

Answer 3

While you can not do wildcards this way, you might fins simply adding entries to /etc/hosts easier than changing DNS configuration.

For example you could add the following lines:

127.0.0.1       abc.localhost
127.0.0.1       def.localhost
127.0.0.1       ghi.localhost

The OS (and therefore most applications, those that don't try be clever and do their own DNS lookups) will be default use values from /etc/hosts before looking up values using DNS servers.

Apache configuration would be the same, wether you sort the name->address mapping via DNS or via hosts file. Also, with either technique you may need to restart client applications (or force a full refresh in web browsers with Ctrl+F5) after making changes as they may cache hostname->address lookup results for a while.