Update from 2023: I have long since stopped using this mechanism. However I leave it here in case you find it useful.

Setting up new hosts entries for every different web site that you develop is hard. This workflow allows you to completely automate it. First thing you’ll want to do is setup a wildcard DNS record that points to your host. This allows you to dynamically setup new development websites without having create new DNS records for each one of them. I created a fake internal-only TLD on my local network’s DNS server that automatically returns the IP address of my development VM for any query to *.devvm. If you don’t have access to that, you could re-use an actual domain and automatically forward something like *.dev.technowizardry.net to the VM. For example, I have the ASUS RT-AC68U router for my personal network. So I SSH’d to the router, typed vi /etc/dnsmasq.conf, then appended: