How To Edit Hosts File on Your System

Hosts file is useful for mapping hostname or domain names with IP locally on system. This file is available on each operating systems and useful for mapping domains with IP address without making any DNS entry.

Sample Hosts File:

127.0.0.1   localhost.localdomain   localhost
::1         localhost6.localdomain6 localhost6

For example if you are running a server on public network and configured a website on that server. Now to access website through domain name, you must be register a valid domain and point DNS records to that server. But using hosts file we can use any test domain name like example.com, www.example.com configure on server and map with ip in hosts file, Using this we can access site from server without any domain registration and pointing dns.

Edit Hosts File on Windows:

On Windows operating systems this file is available at following location with name “hosts”

 C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\

Navigate to above location in file explorer and edit “hosts” file in notepad and make any entry like below at end of file.

127.0.0.1   localhost.localdomain   localhost
::1         localhost6.localdomain6 localhost6

192.168.1.100     example.com
192.168.1.100     www.example.com
10.10.0.11        site1.example.com site2.example.com

Save file and close it. You have done mapping between domain name and IP locally on your system.

Edit Hosts File on Linux/Unix:

On Linux/Unix operating systems this file is generally available at following location

 /etc/hosts

Edit this file and make proper entry with hostname and ip address as below.

# vim /etc/hosts

127.0.0.1   localhost.localdomain   localhost
::1         localhost6.localdomain6 localhost6

192.168.1.100     example.com
192.168.1.100     www.example.com
10.10.0.11        site1.example.com site2.example.com

Save file and close it. You have done mapping between domain name and IP locally on your system