Open Hosts Editor is now officially released!
Over three years after its first commit in 22 Jul 2017, Open Hosts Editor has finally been officially released on Google Play!
Story time! ✨
Why?
As a tinkerer, I needed a quick way of editing my /etc/hosts file on Android, and I didn’t really trust installing a random root app for security reasons, so I thought “How hard can it be anyways? Just make an app that reads/writes the /etc/hosts file”.
What???
For those unfamiliar with the hosts file, this file placed under /etc/hosts on Linux devices and in %windir%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts on Windows, and it allows to map an URL to an IP address, bypassing the DNS. It is useful if you want to make a custom domain name used in your local network, or blocking a website by making it point to 0.0.0.0, which is a non-routable meta-address (i.e. it won’t go anywhere).
How?
It turns out that it was a bit more complicated than that, as the system partition is mounted in readonly mode, so it needs to:
- Remounted in write mode first.
- Write the file on a temp folder.
- Then copy the temp file over in
/etc/hostsusing the command line, because Android doesn’t offer any APIs to access files outside the storage (or the app sandbox). - Mount the system partition in read-only mode.
Despite the problem not having a naturally clean solution, it wasn’t very hard to achieve, and most of Open Hosts Editor was written in one afternoon. All the following changes were more UI-related than core-logic related.
I published the app on the Play Store, and it sat there for a few years, when I realized that it had reached over 100,000 install worldwide, despite being marked as “early access”. Honestly, people, what do you even need it for?
When (did I ask you)?
The greatest joy was when phrogg opened a PR, making it the first PR on Open Hosts Editor, and the first PR I ever received on an open source project. I hope more will come in the future! His contribution sparkled my interested for the project again, and decided to setup the CI using Triple-T’s gradle-play-publisher, which allows to easy publish your app to google play from command line, and makes CI/CD extremely easy for Android apps. All of that, after having to contact Google because I lost the keystore file I initially used to sign the app, fortunately Google Play allows to submit a new private key once if you lost it for some reason.
Back to the present
Now (Dec 2020), I finally decided to take Open Host Editor out of early access, and as an inauguration gift I opened Discord server for everyone to discuss issues, support and suggestions. You can find the app on the Play Store.
The end
This concludes our brief history of the app, but I’m sure that many more chapters will come in the future. Stay tuned!
About Open Hosts Editor
Free and open source application to edit the /etc/hosts file
for rooted Android devices.
