title: Wildcards in a Windows hosts file
body: <p>I want to setup my local development machine so that any requests for <code>*.local</code> are redirected to <code>localhost</code>. The idea is that as I develop multiple sites, I can just add vhosts to Apache called <code>site1.local</code>, <code>site2.local</code> etc, and have them all resolve to <code>localhost</code>, while Apache serves a different site accordingly.</p>
  
  <p>I am on Windows XP.</p>
  
  <p>I tried adding </p>
  
  <pre><code>127.0.0.1       *.local
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>to my <code>c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts</code> file, also tried:</p>
  
  <pre><code>127.0.0.1       .local
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Neither of which seem to work.</p>
  
  <p>I know I can set them up on different port numbers, but that is a pain since it is hard to remember which port is which.</p>
  
  <p>I don't want to have to setup a local DNS server or anything hard, any suggestions?</p>