Using a proxy server as a replacement for hosts file

Question

When developing a website, it's often handy to map the domain to 'localhost' in your hosts file so you can use the real url in a browser. However, switching between local and public hosts using the hosts file gets boring pretty fast, even if you use a tool like gas mask.

I'm wondering if there would be some way to use a proxy server to make things more easy. I want to point my browser to a proxy server that forwards all requests for mydomain.tld to localhost. I've been looking into glype, but i can't find a way to make this work using that.

Answer 1

Charles works like this. It has a feature called Map Local which will let you list a set of files/folders to replace with files from your local disk. It is nearly zero-config when you run it on Windows.