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Alexander Gladysh
Asked: 2012-03-11 13:25:10 +0800 CST

Lightweight local DNS solution for a developer machine to replace fiddling with /etc/hosts

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In our setup we assign a separate domain name for each TCP service for configurability. On production cluster we use BIND to manage it. But on developer machine this currently translates to a bunch of entries in /etc/hosts:

127.0.6.4 foobar-api.foo

That is something like ten entries per project, and a few projects per developer's machine. It is getting really hard to manage.

Please suggest a lightweight DNS server or some other solution to replace /etc/hosts with something that is easier to handle.

We feel that BIND is overkill here.

ubuntu domain-name-system hosts-file

1 Answers

  1. Dnsmasq would probably serve you right. It's basically a really lightweight DNS forwarder, with DNS Server-like capabilities.

    Set up dnsmasq on a server or an old unused PC, then configure your development machines to use it (the dnsmasq server) as primary DNS server. Now you only have to maintain the hosts file on 1 machine, the one running dnsmasq.

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