Background

Ghost is a gem that provides a command and a Ruby API for managing hostnames locally, much as people do manually by editing /etc/hosts now.

Sometime last year I was having to add lots of Passenger virtual hosts on my development machine and felt that having to constantly edit the /etc/hosts file was a bit archaic for my liking and that there must be a nicer way of accomplishing the same task.

Having seen the Passenger Preference Pane added hostnames without requiring the user to do anything special, I had a peak into its source and discovered the dscl (man page) command that comes with Leopard.

For the hell of it I decided to write my Ghost gem using this command and use it to make a nice wrapper that has an easier syntax than dscl, and that is less effort than manually editing my hosts file. Happy with the result, a few other people requested support for other unix systems and Mitchell V Riley was kind enough to patch Ghost to fall back to processing and editing the /etc/hosts file when not on Leopard.

Usage

$ ghost add mydevsite.local
  [Adding] mydevsite.local -> 127.0.0.1

$ ghost add staging-server.local 67.207.136.164
  [Adding] staging-server.local -> 67.207.136.164

$ ghost list
Listing 2 host(s):
  mydevsite.local      -> 127.0.0.1
  staging-server.local -> 67.207.136.164

$ ghost delete mydevsite.local
  [Deleting] mydevsite.local

$ ghost list
Listing 1 host(s):
  staging-server.local -> 67.207.136.164

$ ghost modify staging-server.local 64.233.167.99
  [Modifying] staging-server.local -> 64.233.167.99

$ ghost list
Listing 1 host(s):
  staging-server.local -> 64.233.167.99

$ ghost empty
  [Emptying] Done.

$ ghost list
Listing 0 host(s):

Other

Since creating Ghost I’ve used the Ruby library to add an initializer to my Rails projects that add the domain locally if running under Passenger in development mode (some configuration is needed to let it do this as it needs sudo).

Also, I have heard reports that entries in the /etc/hosts file are ignored in Snow Leopard. I haven’t tried because I only ever use Ghost now, but I do know that Ghost still works well.

Caveats

It only works on Unix-based systems and the /etc/hosts path is hard-coded. Windows support is entirely possible if somebody wants to use it. It isn’t something I am likely to do as I haven’t booted Windows in at least a year. In fact, I don’t think I have even ever installed Ruby on Windows before…