You can use the wildcard domain
Yeah the problem was more that this machine is running on a network where I don’t really control the DNS. That is to say, there’s a shitty ISP router with DHCP and automatic dynamic DNS baked in, but no way to add additional manual entries for vhosts.
I thought about screwing with the /etc/hosts file to get around it but what I ended up doing instead is installing a pihole docker for DNS (something I had been contemplating anyway), pointing it to the router’s DNS, so every local DNS name still resolves, and then added manual entries for the vhosts.
Another issue I didn’t really want to deal with was regenerating the TLS certificate for the nginx server to make it valid for every vhost, but I just bit through that bullet.
They’ll be lucky if I boot my Windows 10 partition between now and 18 months.