Problem: When running a VMWare virtual machine, the machine has an IP you can connect to, but that is hard to remember and subject to change.

Context: VMWare running the Bitnami Magento image.

Solution:

Configure the local machine’s host file to know the VMs ip. Now you can create SFTP bookmarks with the domain name instead of the ip.

Steps:

1. Get the VMs IP address

On the VM machine type:

ifconfig

The IP address with be in the first section, and probably start with 10.0.x.x

2. On OSX change the host file.

The file is at:

/private/etc/hosts

Open it for editing. This needs to be done as root. BBEdit will ask you to authenticate.

Add a new line at the bottom

10.0.1.74 bitnami-vm.local

Remember whatever domain you choose will over ride the rest of the internet, so I picked a .local, which might cause problems with bonjure.

3. Flush your local DNS cache

In terminal type:

dscacheutil -flushcache