In some ways it is an inversion of inetd. Instead of something that listens to a bunch of ports and launches a port corresponding process, the user has a servic

In some ways it is an inversion of inetd. Instead of something that listens to a bunch of ports and launches a port corresponding process, the user has a service that will listen to a random port and they wish to address it in a human-readable kind of way. As far as I know, the hosts file does not afford a port number so a solution would look similar to a proxy on a known port like 443 listening for a particular domain name that hosts routes to localhost and the proxy routes to the service on port whatever. Also need to set up local CA to sign a cert for each of the hostfile domain names. . . 0. https://www.baeldung.com/linux/mapping-hostnames-ports https://www.baeldung.com/linux/mapping-hostnames-ports