Question

I know how to set up a local webserver using xampp on windows… I enter my alias and target on the hosts file (c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts) and then add a respective entry on my apache vhosts config file. This way, assuming that my webserver is listening to port 80, I can for example map example.com to my local webserver.

I’ve always entered the whole domain name (that is e.g. example.com) in my hosts file and any requests on that name would be directed to localhost.

Now I was wondering if there’s a way to only forward example.com on a certain port (for example only example.com:8080) to the local webserver, and leave example.com (on the default port 80) alone, so that it would still go to my live production website.

As far as I understand this might not be possible using only the hosts file (I tried adding the port :8080 to my domain names – didn’t seem work 😉 )…

I really don’t know much on this topic so any ideas, insights, links, reading material, tools are welcome.

Edit: Arnout’s reply answers the question I’ve asked above but doesn’t solve my actual problem. Rerouting example.com:8080 to localhost:80 does work and if I access example.com it loads up the frontpage of my local version, but all links on that page of course don’t know about the port number and therefore point to the production version… The actual solution to my problem seems to be to bite into the sour apple and fix my application (following Rob’s suggestion) and remove all hardcoded urls, so that it works on any domain…

Answer 1

Internet Junkbuster (a proxy server) can do this using its forwarding functionality.

Just add a line like

example.com:8080   localhost:80   .   . 

to sforward.ini, and uncomment the forwardfile line in junkbstr.ini. Now configure your browser to use a proxyserver running at port 8000 of localhost, and you’re set.

I’m sure other proxy servers have a similar feature — I just like Junkbuster since it’s a simple standalone executable.