Application For Editing Ssh Config Mac Hosts File

Once youve made your desired changes to the hosts file, save it in its current location on the Desktop.

While the modern Internet uses a variety of public and private DNS servers to map IP addresses, the hosts file is a handy way to override those DNS servers, allowing you to manually point a website address to the desired IP address, or block access to a site altogether by pointing to an unused or internal IP address.

Application For Editing Ssh Config Mac Hosts File

Lets take a quick look at how to edit the Mac hosts file on macOS.

How to Edit Your Mac Hosts File with Text Edit There are two primary ways to edit the hosts file in Mac OS X.

The first is by using TextEdit since the hosts file is a plain text document.

However, you cant open the file directly since it resides in a protected area of the file system.

Instead, we need to copy the file to an unprotected location, like the Desktop, edit it, and then copy it back.

To find the hosts file, open the Finder, which you can access by clicking on the desktop, the smiley face finder in the lower left of your screen, or by pressing command spacebar Finder.

Click and drag it out of the Finder window and drop it on your desktop.

To open it, simply double-click and it will display the files contents in TextEdit (or the text editor of your choice).

Block IP Addresses By default, the etchosts file is relatively simple.

It contains a number of lines of descriptive text which are commented out with the pound or number (also called a pound or hashtag) sign ().

Any line that starts with a sign is a comment and is not read by the etchosts file.

For each line, any text after the pound sign is ignored by the computer, making it a good way to add notes and descriptions to your files.

It also contains default IP values for localhost and broadcasthost.

To edit the file, youll add your own lines after broadcasthost.

In addition to testing newly developed websites and web hosting migrations, another reason to edit the hosts file is to block access to specific websites.

In our example, well pretend that the computer were using is a device that we want to use exclusively for work, not allowing ourselves to get distracted by Facebook on our work machine.

To do this, type the IP address you wish to assign, followed by two tabs and the hostname.

To determine a websites IP address, you can use the dig command, which comes standard with macOS.

Make note of the IP address thats returned and use it in your Mac hosts file mapping.

For example, The New York Times website returns an IP address of 170.149.172.130.

If we map that to Facebook in our hosts file, any time someone using the Mac tries to go to Facebook, theyll see The New York Times load instead.

Note: Many websites wont allow you to map a domain name to the IP address currently mapped to the site, so youll get a security error when you try.

You can add as many entries to the hosts file as you wish by entering new mappings on each line.

Mac Application For Editing Ssh Config