Local hostnames the easy way

The quickest and easiest way to manage to manage your local hostnames and aliases is to use the ghost RubyGem. Let me show you how.

I was just reading running rails local development with nginx, postgres, and passenger with homebrew on Sam Soffes site, and found it very useful for a quick copy and paste of his configs.

One thing that I found strange though is that he is using /etc/hosts to make local hostnames for web development. If you haven’t found out about the ghost gem yet:

➜  /  gem install ghost --no-ri --no-rdoc 
Successfully installed ghost-0.2.4
1 gem installed
➜  /  ghost add blah.local
  [Adding] blah.local -> 127.0.0.1
➜  /  ghost list
Listing 1 host(s):
                 blah.local -> 127.0.0.1

No need to piss about with your /etc/hosts file anymore, this is as simple as it gets.