Set-up virtual servers in Apache and modify the /etc/hosts file so URLs of your choosing will resolve to the virtual sites that you create. This procedure was tested using Ubuntu Hardy Heron. More here

The /etc/hosts text file is owned by root and allows a simple means to resolve a URL that your type into your web browser to an IP number. In this case we want our example URL of my.example.com to resolve to the IP address of the local machine, just like localhost. This is normally 127.0.0.1. Edit the /etc/hosts file with:

sudo vi /etc/hosts