Simple top level domain (NSSwitch hosts) resolver for linux based development environment.

This tool is developed in a Ubuntu 12.04 system & tested in later versions of Ubuntu & Ubuntu derivatives. Even though not tested, it should also work in other Linux distributions that supports/uses nsswitch.conf file based configuration. In general, if your Linux installation has a file named nsswitch.conf in /etc/ folder, then you should be ready to go with using this tool.

• Make sure you have "build-essential" & "git" packages installed. You can install these using following command

sudo apt-get install build-essentials git

• Clone this repository somewhere in your hard drive

git clone https://github.com/mnishihan/dev-tld-resolver.git

• Run following command to build & install the tool

cd dev-tld-resolver/src && make
sudo make install

It's very important that you run the make install command as root or using sudo, otherwise installation will fail.

• As root (or in super user mode with sudo) also edit /etc/environment using a text editor of your choice and export a global environment variable named DEV_TLD_DOMAINS with comma separated list of Top Level Domains (tld) that you want to resolve to 127.0.0.1 automatically. For example, if you want .dev, .wp, .dpl top level domains to be resolved by dev-tld-resolver, your /etc/environment should have following line within it somewhere.

DEV_TLD_DOMAINS=dev,wp,dpl

Above step is optional if you don't need dev-tld-resolver to resolve top level domains other than .dev, which is the default

• Lastly as root (or in super user mode with sudo) edit /etc/nsswitch.conf file and append dev_tld to the line starting with hosts:.

If you have following line starting with hosts: in /etc/nsswitch.conf file

hosts: files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4

then you should change it to look like

hosts: files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4 dev_tld

If you experience some sort of delay while resolving a host name, you should try to move dev_tld before dns, as follows

hosts: files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dev_tld dns mdns4

• Now logout or reboot your system and login again. After logging in into the system, open a command line and type following command

ping test.dev

If ping is successful, then dev-tld-resolver is installed & configured correctly.

Code is borrowed & modified from prax by ysbaddaden at https://github.com/ysbaddaden/prax