Apache Virtual Hosts

Notes on installing Apache’s vir­tu­al hosts on OpenSol­ar­is 2008.11; part of a series that star­ted with Installing OpenSol­ar­is.

On Debi­an, you have to set up vir­tu­al hosts using sep­ar­ate files, called sites-enabled and sites-avail­able, part of the Debi­an Way Of Doing Things, which is not doc­u­mented on the Apache site. (I’ve writ­ten about this before; the link I refer to there is no longer avail­able, so try this one if you’re on a Debi­an or Ubuntu plat­form.) For­tu­nately, OpenSol­ar­is seems to use the stand­ard Apache meth­ods, so named vir­tu­al hosts can be set up using the doc­u­ment­a­tion at Name-based Vir­tu­al Host Sup­port (the meth­od you choose when you want to run mul­tiple web sites from one IP address). It’s easy to find the httpd.conf file, it’s in the Web Stack Options applic­a­tion, under Advanced Con­fig­ur­a­tion on the Apache2 tab (and even labelled “edit httpd.conf”).

I set up a vir­tu­al host for each web site on the devel­op­ment machine. This is a little more com­plic­ated than it is if you’re start­ing from scratch with a new site, since I want to be able to set up all the soft­ware and sys­tems on each web site on a test basis, before switch­ing the old serv­er off and the new one on. In the mean­time of course, the old serv­er is still serving those web­sites with the same URLs. So I needed a sys­tem that allows the com­puter I’m devel­op­ing on to see the new sites reached from those URLs, while the rest of the world sees the old sites.

The way to do this is to edit the hosts file on the devel­op­ment machine. In a ter­min­al win­dow, type pfexec vim /etc/hosts. After the bot­tom line, which should look some­thing like 127.0.0.1 machinename.local localhost loghost, add the line(s) 127.0.0.1 websitename. You don’t even need to reboot or restart the Apache serv­er, which is nice. If it does­n’t work (you don’t see what you expect in your browser), take a look at your /etc/nsswitch.conf file and make sure that the hosts line has the files dir­ect­ive before the dns dir­ect­ive, oth­er­wise the sys­tem will ask the DNS serv­er (which will return the site the rest of the world sees) before ask­ing the hosts file on your sys­tem. One way to check which IP address you’re look­ing at to make sure you’re look­ing at your test sys­tem, not the out­side one on the net, is to use getent hosts websitename. This should tell you the IP address is 127.0.0.1. The com­mon altern­at­ive com­mand, host websitename, asks the DNS serv­er and thus will tell you what the out­side world sees.

Debug­ging the httpd.conf file is the next step, to make sure you have those vir­tu­al hosts set up cor­rectly. In the end, I just added 

NameVirtualHost *:80

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName domainname
  ServerAlias domainname www.domainname
  DocumentRoot "/var/apache2/2.2/htdocs/domain"
  CustomLog "/var/apache2/2.2/logs/access_log" combined
</VirtualHost>

to the end of the exist­ing httpd.conf file. 

Update: I also had to add

  <Directory /var/apache2/2.2/htdocs/domain>
         Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks
          AllowOverride FileInfo
          Order allow,deny
          Allow from all
</Directory>

to the vir­tu­al host dir­ect­ive (just above the cus­tom log line) to make Word­Press’s pret­ti­er permalinks work.

The one thing OpenSol­ar­is does that is dif­fer­ent to the Apache doc­u­ment­a­tion is put­ting things some­where dif­fer­ent, so instead of using /usr/local/apache2/bin/httpd -S to debug the vir­tu­al host con­fig­ur­a­tion, you use /usr/apache2/2.2/bin/httpd -S. I learned the hard way that if you want to use a default vir­tu­al host, you have to define a ServerName for it.