How to alias a hostname on Mac OSX

Question

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.

Solution

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:

127.0.0.1   local.example.com

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:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName local.example.com
DocumentRoot /www/path/to/example.com
</VirtualHost>

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:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}   !^local\.example\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}   !^$
RewriteRule ^/?(.*)         http://localhost/path/to/example.com/$1 [L,R,NE]

Comments

[Stephen Jennings]

Are you trying to serve web pages to the outside world, or are you only expecting the local.example.com URL to work for your machine?

[Austin Hyde]

Just for my own machine. It gets tiresome typing/remembering the full filepath to my local copy of whatever websites I'm working on.

[John T]

This won't go to a certain path though

[Stephen Jennings]

@John you're right, fixed.

[Kevin Meredith]

If the desired "alias" were https://localhost/path/to/example.com, i.e. HTTPS, not HTTP, would this solution still apply?

[Beetle]

@KevinMeredith that's not possible. The browser has to know that it's talking HTTPS. It might be possible with a HTTP 302 redirect, which in Apache is called Redirect. httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_alias.html#redirect

[Coder Guy]

/etc/hosts usually gets overwritten if you're using a VPN though