Foreword
My rails app cares about the hostname. So for example when the request comes from domain-a.dev it behaves differently than when the request comes from domain-b.dev. I want to test this behaviour and therefore have routed the complete *.dev TLD to 127.0.0.1 on my local machine, so I can set the domain of the server in my tests to what I want but it always uses my local machine tests server.
This is necessary because my tests use selenium, which launches an external browser and browses to domain-a.dev or domain-b.dev. So I cannot simply overwrite request.hostname (or so) in my tests, because this has no effect on the external browser.
Now I want to use a docker image for my tests, so I do not have to configure the test environment on multiple servers but simply start the docker image. Everything works so far but the *.dev resolving.
AFAIK Docker uses the hosts nameserver or google nameserver by default (https://docs.docker.com/articles/networking/#dns), but that would mean to change the host's dns to accomplish my goal which I don't want.
I want to build a docker image, where a special TLD, for example dev, always routes to 127.0.0.1, without touching the docker host.
This means that for everybody running this docker image, for example domain.dev will be resolved to 127.0.0.1 inside the container. (Not only domain.dev, but every *.dev domain.). Other TLDs should work as usual.
An idea I have is to start dnsmasq inside the container, configured to resolve *.dev to 127.0.0.1 and forward the rest to the usual nameserver. But I am new to docker and have no idea if this is too complicated or how this could be accomplished.
Another idea might be to overwrite /etc/hosts in the container with fixed entries for special domains. But this would mean I have to update the docker container in case I want to resolve new domains to 127.0.0.1, which is a drawback if the domains change often.
What do the docker experts say?
I basically worked around this now by using http://xip.io/
By using urls like sub.127.0.0.1.xip.io I can connect to my local machine. My app only has to know that 127.0.0.1.xip.io is treated as the "top level domain", and sub is the domain name without tld. (In a Ruby on Rails app this can be done by adjusting config.action_dispatch.tld_length = 6 for example).