Network routing interaction on MacOS

There is a series of resolution layers governing DNS, IP, and port routing on OSX. Here are some of the different interfaces to manipulate how you route traffic to the internet or to localhost.

/etc/hosts

The hosts file forms a direct association between domain and IP address. It is effectively used as a higher priority routing record to a record in a DNS lookup table. Note that this file does not support port routing. Commands will be routed 1:1 from synthetic domain name to IP.

Given the entry:

192.168.10.1 dev

Accessing the domain in curl or a browser will route accordingly:

curl dev -> 192.168.10.1:80
curl dev:1000 -> 192.168.10.1:1000

ifconfig

Allows you to analyze and manipulate the different networking interfaces on your computer. To view all of the available interfaces:

$ ifconfig -a

lo0: flags=8049<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING,MULTICAST> mtu 16384
    options=1203<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,TXSTATUS,SW_TIMESTAMP>
    inet 127.0.0.1 netmask 0xff000000
    inet6 ::1 prefixlen 128
    inet6 fe80::1%lo0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x1
    nd6 options=201<PERFORMNUD,DAD>
gif0: flags=8010<POINTOPOINT,MULTICAST> mtu 1280
stf0: flags=0<> mtu 1280
anpi1: flags=8863<UP,BROADCAST,SMART,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
...

It also allows the creation of new synthetic IP values, depending on the support of the networking interface. So instead of having localhost be 127.0.0.1 you can also create 127.0.0.2 within the lo0 loopback interface.

sudo ifconfig lo0 alias 127.0.0.2 up

pfctl

Mac replacement to ipfw with a similar command structure. This utility focuses on filtering out packets from the packet filter but can also do much more to manipulate packets. The critical section of the man page:

The packet filter can also replace addresses and ports of packets. Replacing source addresses and ports of outgoing packets is called NAT (Network Address Translation) and is used to connect an internal network (usually reserved address space) to an external one (the Internet) by making all connections to external hosts appear to come from the gateway.

This allows you to route packets across IP/port combinations. Let's say you want to route from the new 127.0.0.2:80 synthetic IP to port 3000 mounted on standard localhost.

echo -n "rdr pass on lo0 inet proto tcp from any to 127.0.0.2 port 80 -> 127.0.0.1 port 3000n" > route_configuration.conf

sudo pfctl -e -f route_configuration.conf

The recommended approach is to supplement the default file that can be found in /etc/pf.conf to maintain Apple's built in routing filters.

/etc/resolver

Just for nameserver definition lookup. Add as independent files that have the domain as the filename:

$ cat /etc/resolver/dev.local

domain dev.local
nameserver 192.168.10.1

DNS servers are expected to respond on 80 and this list is no exception; custom ports are not allowed here.