Pre-requisites

Before we begin this long, complicated and treacherous road to setting up Virtual Hosts in Apache (I’m kidding, by the way) you’ll need to have a LAMP stack setup on your VPS hosting solution. Don’t worry, it only takes a second:

VPS How To: Setup a LAMP Stack on Ubuntu 11.10x

So, let’s get started!

What’s a Virtual Host?

According to the official Apache documentation, a virtual host is:

The term Virtual Host refers to the practice of running more than one web site (such as www.company1.com and www.company2.com) on a single machine.

Creating your First Virtual Host

Let’s create a configuration file for our first virtual host. The configuration file controls the routing and file / folder options for your new virtual host.

To begin, let’s duplicate a pre-existing virtual host by executing:

cp /etc/apache2/sites-available/default /etc/apache2/sites-available/mynewvhost

Let’s create a folder for our new virtual host to route traffic into:

mkdir /var/www/mynewvhost/

Let’s give it a default page by creating an index.html document inside it:

touch /var/www/mynewvhost/index.html

Add some text inside your index.html, via the nano text editor:

nano /var/www/mynewvhost/index.html

Exit and save changes by pressing:

CTRL + o
CTRL + x

Editing the Virtual Host Configuration File

We’ve already created a folder for our new virtual host, but how do I tell Apache to route traffic from: mynewvhost.com into /var/www/mynewvhost/ ?

To do so, let’s start modifying the virtual host configuration file we setup earlier:

nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/mynewvhost

Directly beneath the following property, we’re going to insert three fresh lines of code.

Look for:

ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost

Underneath, insert:

ServerName www.mynewvhost.com
 ServerAlias mynewvhost.com
 DocumentRoot /var/www/mynewvhost

By inserting the above three lines of code, we will tell Apache to:

• Accept all incoming traffic from www.mynewvhost.com
• Accept all incoming traffic from mynewvhost.com
• Route all traffic from mynewvhost.com -> /var/www/mynewvhost

Once inserted, let’s save those changes by pressing:

CTRL + o
CTRL + x

Enabling & Disabling the Virtual Host

Now that we’re done with the messy stuff, let’s enable our new virtual host:

a2ensite mynewvhost

Reload the Apache configuration files by executing:

service apache2 reload

Restarting Apache never hurts:

service apache2 restart

We’re done! Navigate to mynewvhost.com in your browser and you’ll notice Apache has served the index.html file we created earlier.

If you want to disable your new virtual host, simply run:

a2dissite

Footnotes

The reason I set AllowOveride to ‘none’ is so you can create a custom .htaccess file in your new virtual host. This is especially useful, and somewhat necessary, for WordPress and other popular web-applications.

Do you have any thoughts or suggestions? Please let me know in the comments below.