What is Virtual Host:
Virtual host is a mechanism to set up multiple hosts in a single system the user feels that they are getting redirected to different locations when in reality their requests are sent to the same IP, just on different directories. Every virtual host is identified by virtualname. Virtual are useful because you can utilize a single IP location and single machine to host multiple websites. Let’s see how we can setup virtual host on our own machine in few simple steps
Pre-requisites:
In order to setup vhost you need to install and configure apache 2 on your ubuntu system. You can refer to this link to setup apache.
Step 1: Intitalizing and configuring directory
The first step is to create directory which contains the website i.e the document root of your site.
create the folder for your website in var/www/html:
sudo mkdir /var/www/mysite
You need to have root priviliges to create a folder in var/www/html
Now we need to change the permissions for mysite so that it can be accessed without root privilages. We will change the owner to current logged-in user to gain full access of mysite folder:
sudo chown $USER:$USER /var/www/mysite/
Where $USER contains name of current logged-in user.
Also we can ensure that mysite is readable by all the users:
sudo chmod 755 /var/www/mysite/
Step 2: Creating demo page in mysite
Now that we are all done with setting up directory let's add some content to it.
Note: You can skip this step if you have website content ready with you.
Create a file in mysite using nano or you can use any editor.
nano /var/www/mysite/index.html
Add some content like this:
<html>
<title>My Site</title>
<body>
<h1>Hello and Welcome to My Site<h2>
This is where it all started......
</body>
</html>
Press Ctrl+X and save the file.
Step 3: Creating configuration files for virtual host
We are all done with setting up content for our site. Let's move on to setup our virtual host file.
Apache provides a default file for virtual host called 000-default.conf present in /etc/apache2/sites-available/ which we can copy and modify a bit for our virtual host.
Let's copy the default file and open it in nano:
sudo cp /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf /etc/apache2/sites-available/mysite.local.conf
sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/mysite.local.conf
You will see a bunch of parameters in this file. We will modify four of them for basic setup.
SeverAdmin -> the email of your website's admin
Sever Name -> the address of your website
Document Root -> the directory which contains the website.
Server Alias -> a sudo or virtual name that should be displayed on search bar while accessing the site.
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName 127.0.0.2
ServerAlias mysite.local
ServerAdmin admin@mysite.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/mysite
ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>
Save the file and exit.
Step 4: Enabling newly added virtual host
After configuring the virtual host file we have to enable it using a2ensite command (which rougly translates to apache2 enable site)
Change the directory and enable the site:
cd /etc/apache2/sites-available/
sudo a2ensite mysite.com.conf
To make the changes restart the apache server
sudo systemctl restart apache2
Step 5: Configuring hosts file
The last step is to configure /etc/hosts file which contains list of IP addresses and names. It acts like a local DNS file.
Let's open the file using nano:
sudo nano /etc/hosts
Now add the IP address and name of the site.
Note: the name should be same as the name of file for virtual host i.e mysite.local.conf
127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.0.2 mysite.local
And that's it!!
Open browser and type http://mysite.local and you can access your site.
Congratulations! you just setup a virtual host.
References:
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-apache-virtual-hosts-on-ubuntu-18-04-quickstart
https://linuxhint.com/install_apache_web_server_ubuntu/
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