In a nutshell, I would like to be able to open a browser and open local.example.com
but it actually loads http://localhost/path/to/example.com/
I am using Mac OSX 10.5, and not afraid to get my hands dirty with the terminal 🙂
I use Apache as my local server.
Best Answer
Just to be clear, I'm basing this on the assumption that you really do want http://local.example.com to load the literal web page http://localhost/path/to/example.com. In other words, this will only work for this machine. If, on the other hand, you're trying to serve web pages to the outside world using your Mac OS X machine, then that's a different question.
First, add a new line to your
/etc/hosts
file:You can do this by running the command
sudo nano /etc/hosts
, add this line to the end, then save it by pressing Ctrl-X, Y.How you actually redirect/alias the address http://local.example.com to http://localhost/path/to/example.com/ depends on which web server you're using. Assuming you're using Apache:
If you want the user's browser to show local.example.com, then you want to set up a virual host and your
httpd.conf
file should have something like the following:If, on the other hand, you want the web browser's location bar to change to http://localhost/path/to/example.com/, then instead you will want to use mod_rewrite to create a redirect: