Automating Virtual Host setup on your server

Are you also one of those who frequently need to setup VHosts in order to test,create etc new sites and you feel doing the whole process again and again is time consuming and well.. BORING? Then this article is for you!

Note: The script used in this article is written for any Linux distro with Apache server, but you may still get a general idea of how to use it for your requirements.

Here we will create a simple bash script to automate the whole vhost setup process which includes:

Creating a new folder for your website.
Creating configuration files for the website.
Configuring the hosts file and
Enabling the vhost.

Creating template files

Before we start working on our script we will need these template files which we use in the setup:

A template conf file to create configuration for the vhost.
A template index.html file for default homepage of our newly created vhost

This is how my template files looks like:
default-index.html



 <html>
   <head>
     <title>Home|New Virtual Host</title>
   </head>
   <body>
        <h1>Welcome!</h1> 
        You just created a new virtual host!<br>
        Go ahead and add some files in your brand new vhost
   </body>
 </html>

default-vhost.conf



<VirtualHost *:80>
        ServerName 127.0.0.x
        ServerAlias example.local
        ServerAdmin admin@example.local
        DocumentRoot /var/www/example.local

        ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
        CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

You can create similar files based on your requirements.

Now let's get started with the script.

Getting `sitename` and `host` from command line

Let's start by getting the input parameters as command line arguments. We will use the flags:

-s: for sitename
-h: for host

We will also use a flag -d (optional) in case user wants to create a new project directory for the vhost.

We will use getopts to get the arguments, if you are not familiar with getopts you can check out this article.

This is how we can take input from command line:



while getopts s:h:d flag
do
case "${flag}" in
                s) sitename=${OPTARG}
                        ;;
                h) host=${OPTARG}
                         ;;
                d) createdir=1
                        ;;
 echo "Added entry in hosts file"
               *) echo "Invalid option: -$flag" ;;
        esac
done

We are storing the values we got from input in sitename and host variable and setting createdir to 1.

Creating and configuring project directory

Next we will create a folder in /var/www and copy our default-index.html file in that folder:



if [[ $createdir -eq 1 ]]
then
  mkdir /var/www/$sitename
  cp default-index.html /var/www/$sitename/index.html

We are checking if user has specified the -d flag or not, you can remove the condition if you always want create a new directory for your vhost. You can also skip this step depending on your requirement.

Now that we have created the directory let's change the owner to current logged-in user:



  chown $SUDO_USER:$SUDO_USER /var/www/$sitename

This is because only the super user has permissions to create files and folders in var/www, so we are changing the owner of the folder so that the current user will have full control over the folder.

This script needs to be run using sudo, $SUDO_USER contains user name of user which is executing the script using sudo.

Now let's change the permission for



  chmod 755 /var/www/$sitename
fi

Creating configuration files

Now we will create the conf file for our site in /etc/apache2/sites-available/ using or default template:



cd /etc/apache2/sites-available/
cp default-vhost.conf $sitename.conf
sed -i "s/example.local/$sitename/g" $sitename.conf
sed -i "s/127.0.0.x/$host/g" $sitename.conf

Here sed or stream editor is a command line tool for editing, we are using sed to replace example.local with $sitename and 127.0.0.x with $host in our conf file.

Configuring hosts file

Currently your /etc/host must look like something like this :



127.0.0.1       localhost
.
.
.

# The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts
::1     ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
fe00::0 ip6-localnet
.
.
.

We want to add the host and sitename before # The following lines are desirable... line. For this we will once again use the sed:



sed -i "0,/# The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts/s/^# The following lines are desirable.*/$host       $sitename\n&/" /etc/hosts

Enabling virtual host and restarting the server

Now let's enable our vhost using a2ensite command and reload apache:



a2ensite $sitename.conf
systemctl reload apache2
echo "All done! Visit your newly created virtual host at https://example123.local"

And that's it! Phew! We just created a simple script to automate vhost configuration. Let's go ahead and execute it:



sudo ./create-conf.sh -s example123.local -h 127.0.0.12 -d

All done! Visit your newly created virtual host at https://example123.local

Let's visit our newly created virtual host

Here is how our full script looks like:



#!/bin/bash

while getopts s:h:d flag

do

case "${flag}" in

                s) sitename=${OPTARG}

                        ;;

                h) host=${OPTARG}

                         ;;

                d) createdir=1

                        ;;

                *) echo "Invalid option: -$flag" ;;

        esac

done

# Create and configure folder in /var/www if option if option selected

if [[ $createdir -eq 1 ]]

then

  mkdir /var/www/$sitename

  echo "Folder /var/www/$sitename created"

  # Creating dummy landing page

  cp default-index.html /var/www/$sitename/index.html

  echo "Intitialized with index page"

# Changing owner and permission of the folder

  chown $SUDO_USER:$SUDO_USER /var/www/$sitename

  chmod 755 /var/www/$sitename

  echo "Modified permissions and owner"

fi

# Creating configuration files

cd /etc/apache2/sites-available/

cp default-vhost.conf $sitename.conf

sed -i "s/example.local/$sitename/g" $sitename.conf

sed -i "s/127.0.0.x/$host/g" $sitename.conf

echo "Configuration files created"

# Configuring hosts file

sed -i "0,/# The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts/s/^# The following lines are desirable.*/$host       $sitename\n&/" /etc/hosts

echo "Added entry in hosts file"

# Enabling virtual host and restarting the server

a2ensite $sitename.conf

systemctl reload apache2

echo "Restarted apache"

echo "All done! Visit your newly created virtual host at https://$sitename"

Final Thoughts

Though this script may not fully work with your requirement you can definitely get an idea of how to make one for yourself do let me know in the comments what you think about it!