hostman

Hostman is an easy to use web app that allows you to manage your hosts file without the hassle of finding it, opening it, changing, saving and continuing on with life. Instead, you navigate to http://hostman/ (or just hostman/) and add in your hostname and IP address!

Motivation

The motivation for this project is quite simple, and likely one that you can sympathise with: I just want to use hostnames instead of IP addresses when I'm spinning local dev servers.

The one extra thing that hostman can do though, is bind a hostname to a fully resolvable URL! So if you want to, you can point http://yt to https://youtube.com, or http://git/ to https://github.com! Most browsers even accept url/ as a valid URL!

Installation

$ npm install -g @thebrenny/hostman
$ hostman install
$ hostman service install

Hostman has an additional install script (./install/install.js) to bind itself to 127.3.3.3, but to do this it needs to have sudo/Admin privileges, which will be asked during the install process. If the administative request fails, the script will exit unsuccessfully (exit code provided by sudo, or 1).

If you don't install the service, you can execute hostman to quickly spin up the server.

Uninstallation

Hostman is also convenient to uninstall - running hostman service uninstall will uninstall the hostman service, however it will leave your hosts file in tact - therefore you can still run hostman run to spin up the hostman server.

Running hostman uninstall will wipe all hostman-created hosts. This is handy to mass clear your hosts, however it's pretty detructive, and it might be easier to finesses the file by hand instead.

Notes

• The server needs to be up for non-IP bindings to be reachable! If the server is down, bindings such as yt -> youtube.com will not work, but yt -> 127.4.2.5 will.
• Uninstalling via npm without uninstalling the service can make your system whinge! Make sure you delete the service first. Trust me. Maybe it's just Windows, but I had a lot of issues trying to delete the service without having hostman installed.

Sudo

All sudo/Admin requests are handled through sudo-prompt and all actions that modify the actualy hosts file are handled through hosts-etc (also checkout hosts-etc-cli!).

Contributing

Clone the repo, and run npm install (or pnpm install or yarn).

Start a development server:

npm run dev

# or start the server and open hostman in a new browser tab
npm run dev -- --open

Building

To create a production version:

npm run build

You can preview the production build with npm run preview.

Pull requests are welcome. For major changes, please open an issue first to discuss what you would like to change.

License (see license.md)

Project	License	Link
Hostman	MIT	https://choosealicense.com/licenses/mit/
WinSW	MIT	https://choosealicense.com/licenses/mit/