Setting up VirtualHosts on Ubuntu 10.10
On my previous post I talked about setting a LAMP server on Ubuntu 10.10. It was a relatively easy process and it didn’t have any configuration to do.
But what happens if you’re developing a website and wanna use a more friendly domain that localhost?
On this post I’ll show you how to set virtual host and develop your website using a more realistic domain
Change from:
to
Note that you can change mydomain.com to whatever you like. I’ll leave that part to you.
Editing /etc/hosts
Open your terminal and type in this:
sudo gedit /etc/hosts
It will ask for your password, write it and gedit will open:
Check where to write 127.0.0.1 mydomain.com www.mydomain.com
Save and close.
Sites-available
Write this on your terminal:
sudo gedit /etc/apache2/sites-available/mydomain
And just copy and paste this:
Note: You must know the absolute path of your site folder (SITE_ROOT). e.g. ‘/home/me/sites/mywebsite’
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName mydomain.com
ServerAlias www.mydomain.com
DocumentRoot PASTE_YOUR_SITE_ROOT_HERE
</VirtualHost>
Save and close.
Enabling sites
On the terminal:
sudo a2ensite mydomain
Will display a message telling us to restart apache.
So what should we do? let’s reload apache:
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload
We’re done!! you can go now to http://mydomain.com
Other settings
That’s how you basically set VirtualHosts. There are still some things to do like fixing problems that may occur trying to use .htaccess rewrites, but I will talk about that on my next post.
