I do a lot of web dev, mainly RoR and PHP, I've got a VMs which holds my dev environments and handling multiple clients on them is a pain. With PHP you just create a subdir, but with RoR it's a little bit painful.
What I would like to do is create a local DNS server which would redirect queries to a certain TLD to my VMs/Servers.
The TLD would look like *.php.dev
would go on the php VM and mysql.dev
would point to the MySQL server and so on.
I struggled with a local BIND server but it's a real pain. Do you have lightweight alternatives for BIND, preferably ruby/python based.
I tried RubyDNS but eventmachine crashes every time.
Last thing: I run on a MacBook pro with OSX 10.6
Edit I tried dnsmasq but i run in another problem: OSX has a bind daemon to cache. I will investigate how to disable.
Best Answer
We use dnsmasq for exactly this. You can create CNAME records, which define a name aliased to some other, real, name, by editing the configuration files; it's really easy.
Here's some of what we've put in our /etc/dnsmasq.conf:
We have machines called balham, bank, and victoria. We've set up CNAMEs for vpn.initech.office and so on which point to them.
We run it on Linux, but it runs on OS X too.