Written by Blog Author
on January 01, 2020

How to set up your own DNS server for local development

This post talks about setting up a local DNS “server” on your machine.

The reason for doing that is because sometimes we need to make network requests to a host name that is pointing to a local IP address that is not accessible on the Internet. Naturally we can achieve that by just editing the /etc/hosts file, but the approach described here may feel less “hacky”.

The key is using dnamasq.

My machine is running Fedora, and the following steps might be different for other operating systems.

Create a file at /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/dnsmasq.conf and put the following in it:
```
[main]
dns=dnsmasq
```
Restart NetworkManager.
```
sudo systemctl restart NetworkManager
```
Now if you look at /etc/resolv.conf, you will see the name server has been changed to point to 127.0.0.1 which is where dnsmasq is running.
Create a file in this directory: /etc/NetworkManager/dnsmasq.d, and name it <your top level domain name>.conf, such as example.com.conf.
In that file, you put in your “DNS A records”, like so:
```
address=/my-web-server.example.com/127.0.0.1
```

Then you restart both dnsmasq and NetworkManager.

sudo systemctl restart dnsmasq NetworkManager

You can verify that the change is taking effect by

dig +trace <your host name>

That’s it.

By the way, doing this will not jeopardise the normal DNS lookup. Only your “fake domain and hosts” will be resolved locally.

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