Redirect Addresses to localhost by Pattern on Mac OS X

Question

I'm not even 100% sure how to ask this question. The answer might be out there, but I can't find it.

So I've set up virtual hosts for my Mac and I do all my development locally on my computer. I have a vhost folder in my Sites folder, and I have a list of folders, such as:

recipes.cam
database.cam
sandbox.cam
codeigniter.cam

and in my /etc/hosts file I have an entry for each one:

# vhosts
127.0.0.1 recipes.cam
127.0.0.1 database.cam
127.0.0.1 sandbox.cam
127.0.0.1 codeigniter.cam
# ...    

And this works great. When I go to http://recipes.cam in my browser, it shows the contents of the ~/Sites/vhosts/recipes.cam/.

So this is my question: Is there a way to have any address that end in .cam to redirect to localhost? So I don't have to create a new entry in hosts every time I add a new directory (it happens pretty often).

I tried 127.0.0.1 *.cam in my hosts file, but it didn't work :-/

Answer 1

You could install a local DNS server/resolver (e.g. BIND) with a .cam zone containing a wildcard entry and have your resolv.conf point to localhost. The other requests you can either forward to your normal DNS resolver, or resolve them using the root servers.