I have been working on a couple projects that are hosted on gitHub. As the scale and scope of the projects grow, I ended up needing to setup multiple virtual hosts on my development machine. It wasn’t hard, but the information online that I found was fairly dated, so I created this tutorial.
This entire tutorial is done after entering the ‘sudo -i’ command which allows us to act as the SUPER-USER for the entirety of our terminal session. You’ve been warned.
NOTICE!!! I am aware that we could use the ‘a2ensite’ and related commands. But for the sake of understanding the entire process, I will not be using it.
1) Install the required modules from the command line
apt-get install apache2 mysql-server mysql-client php5 php5-cli php5-mysql
2) Change the directory to /etc/apache2/sites-available
cd /etc/apache2/sites-available
3) If you run the ‘ls’ command while in the sites-available directory you should see the following
Output
4) Copy the ‘default’ config to a site specific config. For this tutorial I am using dev.acloudtree.com.
cp default dev.acloudtree.com.conf
5) Make the application directory
mkdir /var/dev.acloudtree.com
6) Open the file with an editor of your choosing. I prefer VIM.
vi dev.acloudtree.com.conf
The output below is the entire file but I will discuss certain parts that we will need to edit.
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
DocumentRoot /var/www
<Directory />
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
</Directory>
<Directory /var/www/>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
allow from all
</Directory>
ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /usr/lib/cgi-bin/
<Directory "/usr/lib/cgi-bin">
AllowOverride None
Options +ExecCGI -MultiViews +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>
ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/error.log
# Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit,
# alert, emerg.
LogLevel warn
CustomLog /var/log/apache2/access.log combined
Alias /doc/ "/usr/share/doc/"
<Directory "/usr/share/doc/">
Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
Allow from 127.0.0.0/255.0.0.0 ::1/128
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>7) Add the name of the server. This will be the name that you type in the URL field of your web browser (IE: Firefox)
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
ServerName dev.acloudtree.com
...8 ) Point the Virtual host to the correct directory
...
DocumentRoot /var/dev.acloudtree.com
<Directory />
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
</Directory>
...9) Also make the change here.
...
<Directory /var/dev.acloudtree.com/>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
allow from all
</Directory>
...10) So this is what your dev.acloudtree.com.conf file should look like when you are done. Write/Quite the file and we will move on.
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
ServerName dev.acloudtree.com
DocumentRoot /var/dev.acloudtree.com
<Directory />
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
</Directory>
<Directory /var/dev.acloudtree.com/>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
allow from all
</Directory>
ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /usr/lib/cgi-bin/
<Directory "/usr/lib/cgi-bin">
AllowOverride None
Options +ExecCGI -MultiViews +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>
ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/error.log
# Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit,
# alert, emerg.
LogLevel warn
CustomLog /var/log/apache2/access.log combined
Alias /doc/ "/usr/share/doc/"
<Directory "/usr/share/doc/">
Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
Allow from 127.0.0.0/255.0.0.0 ::1/128
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>10a) IMPORTANT! Make a symbolic link in the sites-enabled directory
ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/dev.acloudtree.com.conf /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-dev.acloudtree.com.conf
11) We need to edit our /etc/hosts file
Output
127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.1.1 servername
# The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts
::1 localhost ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
fe00::0 ip6-localnet
ff00::0 ip6-mcastprefix
ff02::1 ip6-allnodes
ff02::2 ip6-allrouters
ff02::3 ip6-allhosts
12) Right beneath the ‘localhost’ definition, add the following
127.0.0.1 dev.acloudtree.com
13) The complete file looks like this.
127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.0.1 dev.acloudtree.com
127.0.1.1 servername
# The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts
::1 localhost ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
fe00::0 ip6-localnet
ff00::0 ip6-mcastprefix
ff02::1 ip6-allnodes
ff02::2 ip6-allrouters
ff02::3 ip6-allhosts
14) Create an index.php file in /var/dev.acloudtree.com for testing purposes.
vi /var/dev.acloudtree.com/index.php
Contents of .php file.
<?php
echo 'Jared Folkins\' tutorial on acloudtree.com really works!';
phpinfo();
?>15) Reboot the apache2 process.
/etc/init.d/apache2 restart
16) Now open up your web browser and enter dev.acloudtree.com into the URL bar and it should work!
UPDATE: I forgot to mention that in this environment, I like to configure log files for each virtual host. This is our current dev.acloudtree.com file.
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
ServerName dev.acloudtree.com
DocumentRoot /var/dev.acloudtree.com
<Directory />
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
</Directory>
<Directory /var/dev.acloudtree.com/>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
allow from all
</Directory>
ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /usr/lib/cgi-bin/
<Directory "/usr/lib/cgi-bin">
AllowOverride None
Options +ExecCGI -MultiViews +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>
ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/error.log
# Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit,
# alert, emerg.
LogLevel warn
CustomLog /var/log/apache2/access.log combined
Alias /doc/ "/usr/share/doc/"
<Directory "/usr/share/doc/">
Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
Allow from 127.0.0.0/255.0.0.0 ::1/128
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>Just change the ErrorLog and CustomLog names to match the virtual host.
...
ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/dev.acloudtree.com_error.log
# Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit,
# alert, emerg.
LogLevel warn
CustomLog /var/log/apache2/dev.acloudtree.com_access.log combined
...
</VirtualHost>
