/etc/hosts vs. /etc/resolv.conf
From Wikipedia:
resolv.conf is the name of a computer file used in various operating systems to configure the system’s Domain Name System (DNS) resolver. The file is a plain-text file usually created by the network administrator or by applications that manage the configuration tasks of the system. The resolvconf program is one such program on FreeBSD or other Unix machines which manages the resolv.conf file.
When an application performs DNS lookup as part of its operations on Linux, it can leverage both /etc/hosts and /etc/resolv.conf configuration files to resolve DNS names. How these configuration files are used for DNS lookup can vary among different applications, complicating system administration. But Linux libc library and the GNU C Library (glibc) provides a clean solution to this problem, by defining DNS lookup orders with Name Service Switch (NSS). NSS defines a set of databases and their lookup order in NSS configuration file (/etc/nsswitch.conf in Linux). Applications built with those libraries will then perform DNS lookups in a consistent manner.
In /etc/nsswitch.conf, the database for DNS lookup is called « hosts« . For example:
$ cat /etc/nsswitch.conf | grep "hosts"
hosts: files dns
The above means that DNS lookup refers to /etc/hosts first, and then DNS servers specified in /etc/resolv.conf
gethostbyname() in glibc will follow the DNS lookup order specified in /etc/nsswitch.conf. So do other programs like wget and curl.
Note that DNS lookup tools such as nslookup/dig which are made to query DNS servers, will ignore /etc/nsswitch.conf, and always refer to DNS servers in /etc/resolv.conf
Source: Xmodulo