Working With Virual Hosts On Your Desktop

Bhargi told us how to configure virtual hosts with Apache and Uuntu in a few steps at http://lampcomputing.com/node/38. That post indeed gives us insight to Apache and Ubuntu.

When we are working in teams, we build websites on development servers first. After thorough testing and client's approval we move them to live web servers. When I work on websites alone, I use my desktop as my development server. When I set up too many websites on my desktop, it is a pain in the neck to switch between them frequently. Each time I switch between them, I have to edit the httpd.conf file and restart Apache. With virtual hosts the problem is eliminated.

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. When you configure virtual hosts your web server runs many websites at any given instance. You don't need to edit Apache configuration file and restart Apache every time you switch to a different website.

Here's what I did to set-up virtual hosts on my Fedora desktop

Step 1: Open the Apache configuration file to edit it

Step 2: Add the below directive to the Apache configuration file since we are using name-based virtual hosts. This directive tells the server to use any and all IP addresses on the machine.

Step 3: Add the VirtualHost block to each different website in the Apache configuration file

The above block tells the server to run website1.binaryvibes.co.in using the document root /var/www/html/website1.

Step 4: Add as many virtual hosts as you want using VirtualHost blocks like below:

Save the file and exit.

Step 5: Restart Apache

The virtual host configuration is done. To use the URLs http://website1.binaryvibes.co.in and http://website2.binaryvibes.co.in from the web browser you have add the hostnames in your network configuration.

Step 6: Open /etc/hosts

Step 7: Add the host names

You will now be able to access http://website1.binaryvibes.co.in and http://website2.binaryvibes.co.in from your browser. At any given instance your local web server runs both website1.binaryvibes.co.in and website2.binaryvibes.co.in. How convenient it is to work on multiple websites with virtual hosts!

I use subdomains of binaryvibes.co.in while testing websites on my desktop because they don't exist in the Internet.