Possible to setup some kind of custom home DNS to reroute URLs?

Question

Basically what I run now on my home PC is one of these WAMP in a box applications so I can write my PHP code and use a MySQL database. That is all fine, but I run a lot of websites so now I have a folder I've called /~WEBSITES/ where I put everything making the URLs to these http://localhost/~WEBSITES/domain.com/ -- what I'd like is to be able to type http://local.domain.com/ into my address bar and have it point to my local drive, but I don't want this for everyone, just me.

Possible?

NOTE: I've running Windows XP

Answer 1

Modify the text file named "hosts" found in C:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc\

Suppose you want to point www.mycustomer.com to your local host. Add in:

127.0.0.1 www.mycustomer.com

Answer 2

You'll need to setup virtual hosts in apache (not IIS... oops), and combine that with HardCode's answer. That should do what you need.

Answer 3

You'll need to setup virtual hosts with Apache, and combine that with HardCode's answer (setting your hosts file). That should do what you need.

AUTHOR EDIT: Great article, here's the quick notes on what to do (at least with the most recent version of apache2triad as your WAMP installer)

Add to C:\APACHE_INSTALL_DIRECTORY\conf\httpd.conf:

NameVirtualHost 127.0.0.1
<VirtualHost 127.0.0.1>
    DocumentRoot "C:\apache2triad\htdocs"
    ServerName localhost
</VirtualHost>
<VirtualHost 127.0.0.1>
    DocumentRoot "C:\apache2triad\htdocs\~WEBSITES\Domain1.com"
    ServerName local.domain1.com
</VirtualHost>
<VirtualHost 127.0.0.1>
    DocumentRoot "C:\apache2triad\htdocs\~WEBSITES\Domain2.com"
    ServerName local.domain2.com
</VirtualHost>

Add to C:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

127.0.0.1   localhost
127.0.0.1   local.domain1.com
127.0.0.1   local.domain2.com