In this new post to his site Chris Hartjes shares a tool he's found to help with automated front-end testing for web applications - BrowserMobProxy

At work I have been involved with an effort to put some automated front-end testing in place. The combination of Behat, Mink running tests using PhantomJS is a good one for this. Open source, easy to configure, handles JavaScript-heavy pages reasonably well. There was just one wrinkle in our plans: our use of local host files. [...] So clearly what was needed [to solve a hosts file switching issue] was a proxy. After doing a little bit of digging around I found a solution: BrowserMobProxy.

He briefly introduces the tool and helps you get it installed (as well as the library you'll need to interface with the proxy). His library hooks into a running PhantomJS instance and the BrowserMobProxy, generates the right hosts file (not included) and continues on with the tests.