Redirecting all .dev to 127.0.0.1

I took a habit to use the exact same url of my production websites on my local dev machine but adding .lcl to it and add all urls manually to /etc/hosts

If you’re like me and want to automaticaly redirect one or multiple tlds to one IP we can use dnsmasq

Setting up dnsmasq

First let’s install it

sudo apt install dnsmasq

Then we’ell tell it to redirect all .lcl to localhost. For that let’s edit /etc/dnsmasq.conf

sudo vi /etc/dnsmasq.conf 

and add the following lines at the end of the file

# local dev tld
address=/.lcl/127.0.0.1

# default DNS for other domains
server=8.8.8.8
server=8.8.4.4

Next we’ll stop and disable the systemd-resolved which might cause a conflict

sudo systemctl disable --now systemd-resolved

sudo vi /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf 

and add the following line to the [main] section

dns=dnsmasq

then restart the everything

sudo systemctl restart NetworkManager
sudo systemctl restart dnsmasq