Question

Long story short an API I’m calling’s different environments (dev/staging/uat/live) is set up by putting a host-record on the server so the live domain resolves to their other server in for the HTTP request.

The problem is that they’ve done this with so many different environments that we don’t have enough servers to use the server-wide host files for it anymore (We’ve got some environments running off the same servers – luckily not dev and live though :P).

I’m wondering if there’s a way to make WebRequest request to a domain but explicitly specify the IP of the server it should connect to? Or is there any way of doing this short of going all the way down to socket connections (Which I’d really prefer not to waste time/create bugs by trying to re-implementing the HTTP protocol).

PS: I’ve tried and we can’t just get a new sub-domain for each environment.

Answer 1

One way to spoof a HTTP host header is to set a proxy to the actual server you’d like the request sent to. Something like

request.Proxy = new WebProxy(string.Format("http://{0}/", hostAddress));

may well work.