DNS-Proxy

A command line tool that aims to simplify configuring your development environment for using multiple named domains. It starts a DNS and a reverse proxy server to map routes such as app.localhost to their respective service port. To do this generally required running two services such as dnsmasq & nginx, however that seemed like overkill for doing local development.

Getting Started

Installing

Make sure you have a working Go environment. Then just run the following:

go get github.com/jatinn/dns-proxy

Configuring your development TLD

Note Steps are for Mac OSX.

While you are free to use whatever domain you choose, I would recommend using one of the following restricted TLDs: Go here to learn more

• test
• example
• invalid
• localhost

I will procced using localhost but the steps should be the same no matter what tld you choose.

First we need to add an entry to map the localhost TLD to '127.0.0.1'. This will route all traffic to the TLD whereas /etc/hosts does not support wildcards so you would need to add an entry for each route you use.

sudo mkdir -v /etc/resolver
echo "nameserver 127.0.0.1" | sudo tee -a /etc/resolver/localhost

Next run dns-proxy mapping domains to their service ports. As an example I have two services running on ports 8000 & 9000.

sudo ./dns-proxy --routes app1=:8000,app2=:9000 --tld localhost

Now I can make requests to app1.localhost and app2.localhost which get routed to the correct services. localhost is the default option for the tld so that flag could have been omitted in the command above.

Config File

All the options for the tool can be saved in a config file which should help if you have many different routes you wish to use. Once you have your config file saved you can run dns-proxy with the --config flag or set the DNS_PROXY_CONFIG environment variable.

The config file uses the TOML format. See sample_conf.toml for all the options.

Usage Reference

NAME:
   dns-proxy - Simple DNS and proxy server for developing with named domains.

  DNS-Proxy aims to provide a simple way to route different domains/subdomains
  to services running locally. For example: app.localhost -> localhost:8080,
  redis.localhost -> 192.168.0.1:6379.

USAGE:
   dns-proxy [global options] command [command options] [arguments...]

VERSION:
   0.1.0

COMMANDS:
     help, h  Shows a list of commands or help for one command

GLOBAL OPTIONS:
   --bind value       ip bound for internal routing (default: "127.0.0.1")
   --http-port value  port on which the proxy server will listen (default: 80)
   --dns-port value   port on which the DNS server will listen (default: 53)
   --tld value        tld to be used for development (default: "localhost")
   --routes value     comma-separated list of route pairs SOURCE=DEST.
                      The specified tld is appended to the SOURCE and the DEST
                      is host:port ex:
                      dns-proxy --routes 'app=:5000,api=192.168.0.1:3000'
                      which would proxy requests from *.app.localhost to
                      127.0.0.1:5000 and *.api.localhost to 192.168.0.1:3000
   --config FILE      load configuration from FILE [$DNS_PROXY_CONFIG]
   --help, -h         show help
   --version, -v      print the version

TODO

• improve documentation
• testing
• tool name ???
• automate binary releases
• look into how to make it autostart on boot