I'm trying to get wildcard DNS enabled on my laptop using dnsmasq. I realize that this has been asked and answered more than once on this forum, but I can't get the solution to work for me.

Steps taken so far:

• Installed dnsmasq
• Set address=/example.dev/127.0.0.1 in dnsmasq.conf
• Set listen-address=127.0.0.1 in dnsmasq.conf
• Ensured nameserver 127.0.0.1 is in /etc/resolv.conf
• Set prepend domain-name-servers 127.0.0.1; in /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf
• Created a vhost for example.dev
• Restarted apache and dnsmasq

Note: example.dev is not set in /etc/hosts

My vhost for example.dev

<VirtualHost *:80>
        ServerName example.dev
        DocumentRoot /home/jkendall/public_html/example/public
        ServerAlias *.example.dev

        # This should be omitted in the production environment
        SetEnv APPLICATION_ENV development

        <Directory /home/jkendall/public_html/example/public>
                DirectoryIndex index.php
                AllowOverride All
                Order allow,deny
                Allow from all
        </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

The setup above will server example.dev locally without any problem. It will also serve test.example.dev, but test.example.dev returns the default apache "It works!" index.html from /var/www rather than my index.php in /home/jkendall/public_html/example/public.

The solution in this Server Fault thread suggests that

address=/.example.dev/127.0.0.1

would resolve my problem, but when I try to use that solution, restarting dnsmasq results in a failure with the error message

dnsmasq: error at line 62 of /etc/dnsmasq.conf

For grins, I moved my project over to /var/www/example and modified the vhost appropriately. I got the same result as described above.

At this point I'm not sure what other steps I can take to resolve the issue. Thoughts?