1y ago

How to automate local DNS entries per project?

In many projects, you might have custom DNS entries, for example for your development environment, or because something is prototype without a real DNS entry yet, or simply for convenience to not remember weird IP addresses.

Currently, these special domains might be used in the configuration of a project (say, the DB server is db1.acme.local), and that's version controlled and everything, but creating the actual DNS entry (in the hosts file for example) is still manual and therefore error prone.

Has anyone figured out a nice solution to this? Or do you all have super quick IT departments that'll give you real domains instantly?^^

4 comments

Most new projects / experiments would run under a directory for a testing subdomain that was already established for the sake of saving the most time. I once asked for and was granted access to our company's DNS server and outside provider for setting these up if needed. Otherwise it was editing the local hosts file on my machine or doing that for a different user for collaboration purposes. Looking back, I probably could have scripted these host file edits but didn't need to this very often.

docker-compose gives host names to everything, so you can just use those. If it’s local, then whoever is setting it up needs to give it a DNS record.

Not a DevOps eng so this might not be the most elegant answer but you could write an Ansible playbook to edit a hosts file on the target server and trigger that after deployment, within your CI/CD pipeline.
In an ideal situation, though, all your servers connect to a centralised DNS server (usually your gateway) where those domain names are managed.

For reference, I found a tool that does what I'm looking for: https://github.com/guumaster/hostctl