Mac OS Lion - Wildcard subdomain virtual host - osx-lion

Question

I am trying to get Wordpress 3.3.1 multisite (sub-domains) working in my localhost. However, it appears that I need to have wildcard subdomains configured for my Wordpress vhost. The idea is to have any_subdomain.my_wordpress.local to go to my_wordpress.local.
How do I do this in Mac OS 10.7.3 with Apache 2.2.22?
This is the virtual host set up in my http-vhosts.conf file for that local site:
<VirtualHost *:80>
DocumentRoot "/Users/some_user/Sites/wordpress_mu"
ServerName wordpress_mu
ServerAlias *.wordpress_mu
ServerAdmin some#email.com
# Logging
ErrorLog "logs/wordpress_mu.error_log.log"
CustomLog "logs/wordpress_mu.access_log.log" combined
<Directory "/Users/some_user/Sites/wordpress_mu">
RewriteEngine On
# To allow permalink as specified by wordpress admin interface
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
Options FollowSymLinks MultiViews Includes ExecCGI
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>
# Set valid directory pages
DirectoryIndex index.html index.htm index.shtml index.php
I have also added wordpress_mu into /etc/hosts.
127.0.0.1 wordpress_mu
Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

/etc/hosts doesnt support wildcards so you need to add each subdomain to your /etc/hosts otherwise it wont work.
Alternatively, you can run a DNS server somewhere on your local network whether thats your local machine, another box, or your router. dnsmasq is pretty easy to setup. If you have a wireless router that supports ddwrt then you can even run it on there. That way you can just use a wildcard.