Reroute all links on page to localhost

Question

I am currently doing some minor re-work on a friend's site. I have downloaded what she has currently, but all of the links are absolute links, so whenever I navigate within the locally hosted site, I am pushed to the live site. Instead of overwriting all of those links (on each page, in the database, etc.), I would like to "reroute" any links going to "www.google.com" for example to "localhost/project". Is there an easy way to do this with something like an htaccess file? I should also mention that it is a wordpress site, if there is some other way to go about this.

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered May 18 '13 at 19:31

1

There are several ways:

1) Edit your /etc/hosts.txt file and add a line for "127.0.0.1 www.google.com". (That file is in system32, I think for windows) Don't forget to remove that entry when you're done.

2) Do a search-and-replace on the files while editing. Something like perl -i.bak -pe 's/www.google.com/localhost/' *.html would work.

3) Use a proxy that can modify data. https://github.com/evaryont/mousehole

4) Use greasemonkey or similar to modify the page via javascript.

answered May 18 '13 at 19:31

BraveNewCurrency

12,654
2
42
50

I used the hosts file method, which worked well. Thanks! The path for me was `C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc` The search and replace wouldn't work, because a lot of the paths are in the database as absolute paths. Also note that the file for me was actually in localhost/project, which I could not link to in this way unless I went to google.com/project. I resolved this by making it my DocRoot in my httpd.conf file for Apache, so now localhost points to the project folder. – allicarn May 18 '13 at 19:53

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered May 18 '13 at 19:54

Edit your hosts file.

In linux/osx : /etc/hosts (sudo / su to root, to be able to edit it. for example with vi, pico or nano)

In windows : c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts (open it via Notepad.exe in elevated (admin) priveleges)

You might want to add both google.com as well as www.google.com. (You cannot use wildcards in the hosts file)

Then you need to tell your apache to recognize requests www.google.com , and to serve it from the directory that would also be used by localhost/project

In the httpd.conf file (or related file containing vhosts), you need to add something like:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    DocumentRoot "C:\MyProjects\Project"
    ServerName www.google.com
    ServerAlias google.com
    <Directory "C:\MyProjects\Project">
        Options +Indexes +Includes +ExecCGI
        AllowOverride All
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Thanks for the tip on adding both google.com as well as www.google.com! — allicarn, May 18 '13 at 20:07

Reroute all links on page to localhost

2 Answers2