Maintaining a Go Tool That Edits /etc/hosts on Every OS

Sat, 03 Feb 2024 19:22:00 -0700

Editing the hosts file sounds like the most boring problem in software. Read a text file, add a line, write it back. Then you find out your binary is being shelled out to from a Ruby Vagrant plugin on a Windows laptop with UAC prompts. Your library is being called in a loop by ddev. And every hosts file you parse was hand-edited by somebody at some point. I’ve been maintaining goodhosts for a few years now. I just spent a chunk of the fall and the holidays on it, so here’s what that looks like.

Goodhosts on Luther Monson

Maintaining a Go Tool That Edits /etc/hosts on Every OS