Sometimes you need to edit the hosts file on your machine because of an attack, to block unwanted connections, to redirect requests to a specific IP, etc. This article explains how to modify the hosts file of your Firefox OS phone. It is located under for example /system/etc on Linux, and just etc/ on newer Mac OSX versions.
Preparing your phone
On the phone, go the Developer settings panel and check:
- "Remote Debugging" (in Firefox OS 1.4 and above, select "ADB and Devtools" from the select menu)
- "Console Enabled"
Then plug your phone to your computer.
At this point the steps for modifying the hosts file are the same as for Android. Android developers will quickly settle into the swing of things.
Steps in the terminal
- Open a terminal window.
- Remount the /system partition on the device to get read-write permissions
adb remount
- Get the hosts file on your computer
adb pull /system/etc/hosts /tmp
- Modify the hosts file in /tmp/hosts as needed and save the file. For example:
127.0.0.1 localhost ip.to.re.direct hostName
- Push the modified hosts file to the device
adb push /tmp/hosts /system/etc/hosts
This is it; your hosts file should now be updated.
Note: To learn more about ADB? Have a look at the ADB documentation.