Does hosts file exist on the iPhone? How to change it?

Another option here is to have your iPhone connect via a proxy. Here’s an example of how to do it with Fiddler (it’s very easy):

http://conceptdev.blogspot.com/2009/01/monitoring-iphone-web-traffic-with.html

In that case any dns lookups your iPhone does will use the hosts file of the machine Fiddler is running on. Note, though, that you must use a name that will be resolved via DNS. example.local, for instance, will not work. example.xyz or example.dev will.

This doesn’t directly answer your question, but it does solve your problem…

What make of router do you have? Your router firmware may allow you to set DNS records for your local network. This is what I do with the Tomato firmware

Not programming related, but I’ll answer anyway. It’s in /etc/hosts.

You can change it with a simple text editor such as nano.

(Obviously you would need a jailbroken iphone for this)

I just edited my iPhone’s ‘hosts’ file successfully (on Jailbroken iOS 4.0).

• Installed OpenSSH onto iPhone via Cydia
• Using a SFTP client like FileZilla on my computer, I connected to my iPhone
  • Address: [use your phone’s IP address or hostname, eg. simophone.local]
  • Username: root
  • Password: alpine
• Located the /etc/hosts file
• Made a backup on my computer (in case I want to revert my changes later)
• Edited the hosts file in a decent text editor (such as Notepad++). See here for an explanation of the hosts file.
• Uploaded the changes, overwriting the hosts file on the iPhone

The phone does cache some webpages and DNS queries, so a reboot or clearing the cache may help. Hope that helps someone.

Simon.

It might exist, but you cannot change it on a non-jailbreaked iPhone.

Assuming that your development webserver is on a Mac, why don’t you simply use its Bonjour name (e.g. MyMac.local.) instead of myrealwebserverontheinternet.com?

Don’t change the DNS on the phone. Instead, connect with wifi to the local network and you are all set.

At my office, we have internal servers with internal DNS that are not exposed to the Internet. I just connect with iPhone to the office wifi and can then access them fine.

YMMV, but instead of configuring the phone DNS, it feels to me that just setting up local internal DNS and wifi is a cleaner and easier solution.

In case anybody else falls onto this page, you can also solve this by using the Ip address in the URL request instead of the domain:

NSURL *myURL = [NSURL URLWithString:@"http://0908603917/mypage.php"]; 

Then you specify the Host manually:

NSMutableURLRequest *request = [NSMutableURLRequest requestWithURL:myURL]; [request setAllHTTPHeaderFields:[NSDictionary dictionaryWithObjectAndKeys:@"myserver",@"Host"]]; 

As far as the server is concerned, it will behave the exact same way as if you had used http://myserver/mypage.php, except that the iPhone will not have to do a DNS lookup.

100% Public API.

No, an iPhone application can only change stuff within its own little sandbox. (And even there there are things that you can’t change on the fly.)

Your best bet is probably to use the servers IP address rather than hostname. Slightly harder, but not that hard if you just need to resolve a single address, would be to put a DNS server on your Mac and configure your iPhone to use that.