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SwitchHosts

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Homepage: https://switchhosts.app

SwitchHosts is an App for managing hosts file, it is based on Tauri, React, Jotai, Mantine, etc.

Screenshot

Features

• Manage system, local, remote, group, and folder hosts entries
• Switch hosts quickly from the main window or system tray
• Syntax highlighting for hosts files
• Find and replace across hosts entries
• Refresh remote hosts manually, on a schedule, or at startup
• Import/export hosts data, including importing backups from a URL
• Move entries to the trashcan and restore or delete them later
• Preferences for write mode, proxy, update checks, launch at login, post-apply commands, and the local HTTP API

Install

Download

You can download the source code and build it yourself, or download the built version from following links:

• SwitchHosts Download Page (GitHub release)

You can also install the built version using the package manager Chocolatey:

choco install switchhosts

Backup

SwitchHosts stores data at ~/.SwitchHosts (Or folder .SwitchHosts under the current user's home path on Windows). In the v5 data layout:

• ~/.SwitchHosts/manifest.json stores the hosts tree
• ~/.SwitchHosts/entries/ stores local and remote hosts content
• ~/.SwitchHosts/trashcan.json stores trashcan entries
• ~/.SwitchHosts/internal/config.json stores preferences
• ~/.SwitchHosts/internal/histories/ stores system hosts and command run history

For a complete manual backup, copy the whole ~/.SwitchHosts folder. The in-app export creates a hosts data backup JSON; it does not include preferences or histories.

System hosts are written as UTF-8 without a BOM. Before converting an existing Windows ANSI or BOM-marked UTF-16 file, SwitchHosts saves its original bytes in internal/histories/hosts-encoding-backups/ under the active data directory, even when history recording is disabled. These .bin backups are not removed by the history limit or included in the in-app JSON export.

Develop and build

Prerequisites

• Node.js 24 LTS
• Rust >= 1.90
• Tauri system dependencies, see Tauri Prerequisites

Development

• Run npm install to install dependencies
• Run npm run tauri:dev to start the app in development mode

Build and package

• Run npm run tauri:build to create a production build
• The packaged files will be in ./src-tauri/target/release/bundle/

# development
npm run tauri:dev

# production build
npm run tauri:build

Copyright

SwitchHosts is a free and open source software, it is released under the Apache License.