osx snow leopard - Create a local DNS TLD for development

I do a lot of web dev, mainly RoR and PHP, I've got a VMs which holds my dev environments and handling multiple clients on them is a pain. With PHP you just create a subdir, but with RoR it's a little bit painful.

What I would like to do is create a local DNS server which would redirect queries to a certain TLD to my VMs/Servers.

The TLD would look like *.php.dev would go on the php VM and mysql.dev would point to the MySQL server and so on.

I struggled with a local BIND server but it's a real pain. Do you have lightweight alternatives for BIND, preferably ruby/python based.

I tried RubyDNS but eventmachine crashes every time.

Last thing: I run on a MacBook pro with OSX 10.6

Edit I tried dnsmasq but i run in another problem: OSX has a bind daemon to cache. I will investigate how to disable.

Answer

We use dnsmasq for exactly this. You can create CNAME records, which define a name aliased to some other, real, name, by editing the configuration files; it's really easy.

Here's some of what we've put in our /etc/dnsmasq.conf:

domain=initech.office
cname=vpn.initech.office,balham
cname=mail.initech.office,bank
cname=cacti.initech.office,victoria
cname=opennms.initech.office,victoria

We have machines called balham, bank, and victoria. We've set up CNAMEs for vpn.initech.office and so on which point to them.

We run it on Linux, but it runs on OS X too.