At TripleLift, we’re big fans of the Switcheroo plugin and rely on it during development to test new versions of our code. It allows us to override a production hostname with one of our development boxes so we can see how our code works on a live site. So if a production site is referencing a JavaScript file at http://production-environment/script.js we use Switcheroo to have it reference the development file at http://dev-environment/script.js. Unfortunately, it’s only available for Chrome which makes it more difficult to run browser specifics tests on other browsers.

To deal with this problem we came up with a small redirection app that runs locally and is browser agnostic. Instead of entering the desired host to redirect in the extension, you add it to the local hosts file, mapping it to localhost. This bypasses the DNS lookup and sends all requests to that domain to the locally running server which then serves a redirect to the desired URL. The code’s up on GitHub with a readme that should hopefully be easy to follow.