Sunday, February 09, 2014

Chrome's HOST-RULE flag

I'm currently working in an Apex environment, and we will soon be running some of our apex applications off a second domain name mapped to the same host.

For me this has mean a little playing around with VirtualHost in the httpd.conf which is something I don't get to do very often. But I am having to wait on others to actually set up the new DNS entry to map the domain name to the server.

If this was a brand new server with its own IP, then I could simply use the IP address. But since it is sharing a server and request using the IP goes straight to the old 'default' VirtualHost.

On the server itself I can touch up the hosts file to hard-code the entry. But the only browser I can use on the server is very dated and nearly unusable. And on my PC, I don't have admin rights to amend the PC hosts file.

Fortunately we do get chrome on our machines (tucked away as chrome-frame, but chrome nonetheless). And chrome has a handy little command line flag called "--host-rules". 

Using: --host-rules="MAP newdev.site.com 10.16.100.200" I can map the new hostname to its planned IP address and bypass the DNS lookup on the PC. Very handy when you are waiting for the DNS entry or if you want to override an existing name to point to a test or dev environment.