Routing all dev domains to localhost

When developing locally, you might find your self that you often need to route some domain to localhost, for example my-amazing-website.dev
Usually I used to do that by adding that domain to my /etc/hosts file, but I found that keeping track of all those domains and adding more will crowd my hosts file and will make it look ugly, not to mention that every time I wanna try some domain I need to save it in my hosts file first.
So I found a way to make this work dynamically, by installing a local lightweight DNS server called dnsmasq, dnsmasq can use a regex to resolve domains, so i found it easy to just apply a regex on all domains that end with the .dev suffix.

First let’s install dnsmasq, for ubuntu/debian you can simply use apt-get Then edit the conf file /etc/dnsmasq.conf and add this line The remaining would be adding the localhost as a dns resolver, the easiest way would be adding it manually in the network manager, but to keep it dynamic and not affected by your own network manager settings you can use something like the resolvconf package, first we install it Then we edit the base file /etc/resolvconf/resolv.conf.d/base and add this simple line