Wildcard DNS with Dnsmasq on Mac OS X

A wildcard domain is a domain name that will match requests for non-existent sub-domain names. This is fairly simple with a registered domain name and consist of adding a dns record like *.example.com. For more info about setting up a wildcard public domain name, refer to your domain registrar.

During last months I worked on a big project that required a wildcard dns domain and, as usual for every project I work on, I like to have a shadowed local environment. How to create a local wildcard domain name on Mac OS X the easy way? The answer is Dnsmasq.

First of all install Dnsmasq using Brew (if you didn’t installed Brew yet, please do it now!)

:::bash
brew install dnsmasq

Then you can follow these steps to configure a local wildecard dns on your Mac OS X ennvironment:

:::bash
cp /usr/local/opt/dnsmasq/dnsmasq.conf.example /usr/local/etc/dnsmasq.conf
sudo cp -fv /usr/local/opt/dnsmasq/*.plist /Library/LaunchDaemons
sudo chown root /Library/LaunchDaemons/homebrew.mxcl.dnsmasq.plist
sudo launchctl load /Library/LaunchDaemons/homebrew.mxcl.dnsmasq.plist

tee /usr/local/etc/dnsmasq.conf > /dev/null <<EOF
address=/mylocaldomain.dev/172.17.8.200
EOF

sudo launchctl stop homebrew.mxcl.dnsmasq
sudo launchctl start homebrew.mxcl.dnsmasq
sudo mkdir -p /etc/resolver

tee /etc/resolver/mylocaldomain.dev > /dev/null <<EOF
nameserver 127.0.0.1
EOF

Please be sure to replace mylocaldomain.dev with your local domain and 172.17.8.200 with the local ip of your project (i.e. a Vagrant/Virtualbox machine).

Now, if the installation was successful, if you ping let’s say test.mylocaldomain.dev, you system should always resolve 172.17.8.200 (or the ip address you configured before)