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.
sudo -i
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
lsOutput
default default-ssl
4) Copy the ‘default’ config to a site specific config. For this tutorial I am using dev.acloudtree.com.
cp default dev.acloudtree.com.conf5) 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.confThe 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
vi /etc/hosts
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>
