As a Web developer you often use a local webserver. You might create an own VHost for each project. The next step is to add a domain like mycustomer.local with the IP 127.0.0.1. This is done by adding a line to your /etc/hosts file.

If you do not want to add a new entry each time you create a new project to  /etc/hosts, the is a simple way to add a wild card entry on Ubuntu.

This works, because current Ubuntu versions use the Network Manager which itself starts the local DNS server “dnsmasq”.

1. Create a file /etc/NetworkManager/dnsmasq.d with the contents:
   address=/.local/127.0.0.1
2. Restart the network manager.
   service network-manager restart
3. Check if everything went well
   # host foobar.local
foobar.local has address 127.0.0.1