A utility to manage hosts files for project-specific development/testing environment setup.

• Set and sync a hosts file from a configuration file
• Watch the configuration file for changes and automatically update the hosts file
• Use an HTTP endpoint for dynamic updates based on the current application state

Head over to the releases page or install from source;

go install github.com/boljen/hostman@latest

IMPORTANT! The binary requires elevated privileges to modify the hosts file.

Step 1: Create a configuration file "hostman.hcl" in the current directory or any of the root directories:

project = "my-project"

sources = [
    "main"
]

static "main" {
    host = "example.com"
    ip = "127.0.0.1"
}

Step 2: Run the binary as administrator (you can enable "sudo" in Windows in the developer settings):

sudo hostman apply

There should be a new section in your hosts file that maps example.com to 127.0.0.1.

Alternatively you can use watch mode which will refresh every 5 seconds;

sudo hostman apply -w

Finally you can clean up the hostsfile of all applied configurations

sudo hostman clean

You can rewrite the static block as follows to allow multiple hosts:

static "main" {
    hosts = [
        "example.com",
        "example.org"
    ]
    ip = "127.0.0.1"
}

You can specify an "http" block which will use an http endpoint to determine the hosts to map:

http "main" {
    endpoint = "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/boljen/hostman/refs/heads/master/examples/http/response.json"
}

This is useful when you are working with a multi-tenant application where a tenant lives in a dynamically generated subdomain or brings their own domain.