Modify etc/hosts file with node.js

Oct 16th, 2016

I've been manually updating my etc/hosts to add subdomains for an app that I'm working on, but now I'm on a new computer and I needed to re-setup my etc/hosts file so I figured I should create a bin/setup.js file to automate the process and ensure that I don't have to manually configure anything to get my tests to pass.

To edit my hosts file with node I decided to try and use hostile.

It was pretty easy to use:

npm install hostile --save

Then in your js file:

var hostile = require('hostile');

var subdomains = ['one', 'two', 'three'];

subdomains.forEach(function (sd) {
  hostile.set('127.0.0.1', sd + '.myapp.local', function (err) {
    if (err) {
      console.log(err);
    } else {
      console.log('added: ' + sd);
    }
  });
});

So far the only downside to using node for this is that it requires root access and I don't want to give node root access. I'm sure this is pretty bad too (but way less worse) I just gave my user permission to edit the /etc/hosts file:

sudo chown blake /etc/hosts

Since my app is also going to need to setup up subdomains dynamically as users sign up it might be better to use something like dnsmasq and just use a wildcard route to map all subdomains to my route and not worry about adding individual entries to the /etc/hosts file.