Multiple vhosts, Apache

by Zaptoid | Nov 3, 2011 | HowTo

One of the most common Apache2 questions I’ve seen on Debian mailing lists is from users who wonder how to host multiple websites with a single server. This is very straightforward, especially with the additional tools the Debian package provides.
There are many different ways you can configure Apache to host multiple sites, ranging from the simple to the complex. Here we’re only going to cover the basics with the use of the NameVirtualHost directive. The advantage of this approach is that you don’t need to hard-wire any IP addresses, and it will just work. The only thing you need is for your domain names to resolve to the IP address of your webserver.
For example if you have an Apache server running upon the IP address 192.168.1.1 and you wish to host the three sites example.com, example.net, and example.org you’ll need to make sure that these names resolve to the IP address of your server.
(This might mean that you need example.com and www.example.com to resolve to the same address. However that is a choice you’ll need to make for yourself).
Since we’ll be hosting multiple websites on the same host it makes a lot of sense to be very clear on the location of each sites files upon the filesystem. The way I suggest you manage this is to create a completely seperate document root, cgi-bin directory, and logfile directory for each host. You can place these beneath the standard Debian prefix of /var/www or you may use a completely different root – I use /home/www.
If you’ve not already done create the directories to contain your content, etc, as follows:

root@irony:~# mkdir /home/www

root@irony:~# mkdir /home/www/www.example.com
root@irony:~# mkdir /home/www/www.example.com/htdocs
root@irony:~# mkdir /home/www/www.example.com/cgi-bin
root@irony:~# mkdir /home/www/www.example.com/logs

root@irony:~# mkdir /home/www/www.example.net
root@irony:~# mkdir /home/www/www.example.net/htdocs
root@irony:~# mkdir /home/www/www.example.net/logs
root@irony:~# mkdir /home/www/www.example.net/cgi-bin

root@irony:~# mkdir /home/www/www.example.org
root@irony:~# mkdir /home/www/www.example.org/htdocs
root@irony:~# mkdir /home/www/www.example.org/logs
root@irony:~# mkdir /home/www/www.example.org/cgi-bin

Here we’ve setup three different directory trees, one for each site. If you wanted to have identical content it might make sense to only create one, and then use symbolic links instead.
The next thing to do is to enable virtual hosts in your Apache configuration. The simplest way to do this is to create a file called /etc/apache2/conf.d/virtual.conf and include the following content in it:

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