TL;DR: I had to do a bunch of research in order to set up pretty URLs to apps running on my localhost at a particular port, so I decided to write up the steps I followed in one place in case anyone else wants to do this. Scroll down past the reasons I wanted to do this for the instructions.

I recently decided to use a non-admin user with OSX Yosemite on a daily basis, mostly on the recommendation of a security researcher who discovered a vulnerability in OSX, and because it sounds like a good idea in general.

The only problem I’ve encountered so far is in installing Pow– the script to install it wants sudo, but it also wants to be run as the current user. There are instructions on the wiki for installation as a standard user, but they appear to be out of date; I got errors when trying to use npm run-script. I also got errors when trying to install it from source. So ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

The thing is, I was only using Pow for its pretty URL creation anyway; I use foreman or grunt to run my apps instead of Pow’s rack server. So I set out to get URLs like http://my-project.dev to serve up a rails app that I would usually access at http://localhost:3000.

My first thought was that I could just use /etc/hosts, but that only works for host names, not host names and ports. Luckily, Apache can do this and, conveniently enough, is included with OSX!

BUT WAIT! I do still need to use /etc/hosts, so that the host goes to localhost where Apache will handle it.

Instructions

So, to spell it all out, I logged in as my admin user (since I’m running from a non-admin day-to-day now) and edited /etc/hosts using sudo:

$ login admin
password:
admin$ sudo vim /etc/hosts

In order to add a new entry for my-project.dev. So now, my /etc/hosts file looks like:

##
# Host Database
#
# localhost is used to configure the loopback interface
# when the system is booting.  Do not change this entry.
##
127.0.0.1	localhost
255.255.255.255	broadcasthost
::1             localhost

127.0.0.1       my-project.dev

At this point, still as the admin user, I started up apache by doing:

admin$ sudo apachectl start

And then I could go to http://my-project.dev and see the Apache “It works!” page. We’re halfway there!

Now, edit /etc/apache2/httpd.conf, find this part about Virtual Hosts and uncomment the Include line so it looks like this:

# Virtual hosts
Include /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf

Then, edit THAT file, /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf, remove the two sample <VirtualHost>s, and insert a new one that looks like this, as recommended by this ServerFault answer:

NameVirtualHost *:80

<VirtualHost *>
    ServerName my-project.dev
    ProxyPreserveHost On

    # setup the proxy
    <Proxy *>
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
    </Proxy>
    ProxyPass / http://localhost:3000/
    ProxyPassReverse / http://localhost:3000/
</VirtualHost>

Then restart apache:

admin$ sudo apachectl restart

And, if you’ve got your app running at port 3000, you should be able to visit http://my-project.dev in your browser and get to your app!