When you’re developing locally, whether you’re using MAMP, XAMP or Vagrant, at some point you might need to give a special name to your local development environment.
Because why not?
I mean it’s totally okay to go to http://192.168.33.10 but why not make it http://mijimo.local or http://www.mijimo.dev
To do that, we need to edit our hosts file on our Mac.
It’s a pretty easy and straightforward task. Here’s how to do it.
Editing your hosts file on a Mac
Step 1:
Open your Mac’s Terminal (by the way, if you’re into trying something new I suggest iTerm2)
Step 2:
Edit your hosts file. It’s located at /private/etc/hosts
In your Terminal window enter the command below
sudo nano /private/etc/hosts
I like to use iTerm2 instead of standard Terminal app
sudo lets you act as the root user, so you’ll be asked to enter root account’s password. Next, nano is a text editor working in your Terminal window, that’s the program we use to edit our hosts file.
Step 3:
Add the following line to the end of the file (also modify according to your likes)
192.168.33.10 mijimo.local www.mijimo.com
NOTE: Your hosts file may look different than mine
This tells your Mac to directly go to the given IP address without hesitation, when you enter the URL http://mijimo.local or http://www.mijimo.local
Step 4:
Press Control-x, you’ll be prompted to save the changes and exit.
Step 5:
In some cases, you may need to flush your Mac’s DNS cache.
To accomplish this you need to enter the code below:
sudo dscacheutil -flushcache
When I enter the address I’m directly taken to my local development environment, which is Scotch box.
And you’re good to go.
