Eric Thoreson

Changing the host file on a Mac is very easy, but it’s certainly not intuitive. This little tutorial will show you how.

Launch Terminal

Type:

sudo su
vim /etc/hosts
shift-a

Scroll to your desired insertion point and enter the info in this format:

IP address [space] www.example.com [space] example.com

Then the following to save and close the file:

esc
:wq
enter
exit

Done!

This comes in handy when doing development on a new site — point your host file to the dev server and test the site before pushing it live.

Remember to delete the entry when you want to go back to the live site. You can also comment out the entry (if you think you may want to use it in the future) by prepending the entry with a # — example:

# IPaddress www.example.com example.com

Thanks Casey!

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