Hostage

Hostage is a command line utility to manage local hostnames, inspired by the Ghost GEM for ruby.

Tipically this is done editing /etc/hosts on Unix systems, but with Mac OS X we can use the Open Directory Services as an alternative. I prefer not to mess with system files, I want to keep my /etc/hosts file as clean as possible...

NOTE: Currently Hostage doesn't work with OSX Lion / Mountain Lion. I'm Looking for a fix. This has to do with how Lion / Mountain Lion handles Open Directory Services.

Compiling and installing hostage

Requirements

Mac OS X
CMAKE (Install with Mac Ports or similar)

For the impatient

Clone the repository and use:

cmake . && sudo make install

HELP

This is the help output from hostage --help. I think this should be enough... :-)

USAGE: hostage [options] <command> [hostname [ip]] | [pattern]

Options:
--force  Required for some operations.

Commands:
list [pattern]
        Lists the current configured local hostnames in Open Directory.
        Use [pattern] to only list entries containing [pattern] in the
        hostname or IP address.

        Output is compatible with /etc/hosts format.

add [hostname] [ip address]
        Adds [hostname] to the local hostname list, with [ip address].
        Defaults to 127.0.0.1 if no IP address given.

        If both [hostname] and [ip address] is missing, hostage reads
        from stdin a list of ip-hostname pairs in /etc/hosts format.

delete <hostname>
        Removes <hostname> from the local hostname list.
        You need to use the --force if there is no exact match.

clean
        Removes ALL local hostnames from Open Directory Services.
        You need to use the --force here, master.

Examples

Adding mywebapp.priv to the local hostnames pointing to 192.168.0.1

sudo hostage add mywebapp.priv 192.168.0.1

Getting a list of all local hostnames

hostage list

Export the list to a file (the format is like /etc/hosts)

hostage list > hosts.txt

Clear all local hostnames

sudo hostage --force clean

Import the hosts definition from a file

hostage add < hosts.txt

You need superuser privileges to do that, so you can use someting like this:

cat hosts.txt | sudo hostage add

Deleting a host with exact match

sudo hostage delete mywebapp.priv

Deleting hosts matching a pattern (note the use of the --force)