I got all the building bits sorted out. Then was putzing around with running a local DNS server to point everything to 127.0.0.1. But then port forwarding started to become an issue (Mac users can't [easily] port forward for ports <1024).
Would one of you be able to look at it so that I can finish the buddycloud-vm. In theory I could create a massive patch and orchestrate that against the code... but that feels nastier than hardcoded values.
As soon at that's ready, I'm going to do a big blog post about the buddycloud-vm and shipping bits to production :)
Thanks for everyone's help.
S.