Make Windows VirtualBox guest follow Mac host DNS resolution

Question

I already have a custom domain name entry on my Mac's /etc/hosts file that I use for local testing. I'm able to connect from a browser using http://dev.mysite.co:5000.

127.0.0.1 dev.mysite.co
127.0.0.1 localhost

I'm using one of the VirtualBox images that Microsoft provides to test my site in Edge. I'm running into CORS issues since I have to connect to my localhost using http://10.0.2.2:5000, so I'd like to reuse the domain settings from my /etc/hosts.

The node server on my localhost is listening on 0.0.0.0:5000.

I ran this command which is supposed to get guest OSes to use the host's DNS, but I'm not able to load http://dev.mysite.co:5000 inside my VM.

VBoxManage modifyvm "MSEdge - Win10_preview" --natdnshostresolver1 on

Is this command still valid? Is there anything else I should be doing to get this to work?

Answer 1

/etc/hosts file is not a part of DNS resolver. You could just copy your /etc/hosts to C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts but that won't work because from the point of VM 127.0.0.1 is VM's IP (loopback).

For that to work you should add to C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts the following line:

 10.0.2.2       dev.mysite.co

which will resolve any dev.mysite.co request inside VM to your host's IP (which is i assume 10.0.2.2 - please check IP of VM adapter on your host's OS, via for example ifconfig vboxnet0)