How to use production webserver configuration locally - testing

Question

I'm using Nginx virtual hosts to serve a domain and I want to test my configuration locally before deploying.
The only way I've found to do that is to run nginx on local port 80 and temporarily add the following line to my /etc/hosts file:
127.0.0.1 example.com
which causes example.com to resolve to my local nginx instance.
Is there a better way to deal with this?

Answer 1

Local Host
When I just need to quickly check a server running on my local host, the following shell script has proven convenient:
spoof() {
hosts_file='/etc/hosts'
temp=$(mktemp)
cp "$hosts_file" "$temp"
trap 'sudo sh -c "mv \"$temp\" \"$hosts_file\""; trap "" EXIT; return 0' 0 1 2 3 9 15
hosts_lines="6i# SPOOFS:\n"
for i in "$#"; do
hosts_lines+="127.0.0.1\t$i\n"
shift
done
sudo sh -c "sed -i \"$hosts_lines\" \"$hosts_file\""
echo "Press CTRL-C to exit..."
sleep infinity
}
It takes any number of domains, spoofs them, and replaces the original /etc/hosts upon exit. Example usage:
$ spoof example.com example.net example.org
Vagrant
For long-term use, I use Vagrant along with the vagrant-hostsupdater plugin.
After installing, simply adding config.hostsupdater.aliases = ['dev.example.com'] to any Vagrantfile allows access to "example.com" on the VM via "dev.example.com" on the host.