Setting up virtual host with mod rewrite enabled in Ubuntu Hardy Heron

Virtual host is really what the name says, a virtual environment over the top of your current web server to simulate a separate hosting environment. Using virtual host you can enable site specific features and keep your development environment totally separate from another one. For example, if you want to experiment a simple application with both mod_rewrite enabled or disabled, you can setup two virtual host with these different settings to take place. In this blog post I will show you how to set up virtual host in ubuntu hardy heron with mod_rewrite enabled.

Step 1: setup a virtual domain

open /etc/hosts and add a virtual domain with a specific local IP. In this file it contains ip and domain name separated by a space. You can also add the port using a colon with the IP. Lets assume that our virtual domain name is “ilove.php” – and It will listen to the ip “127.0.1.2”

so we will add the following line to our /etc/hosts file
127.0.1.2:80 ilove.php

now whenever you point to http://ilove.php – your browser will actually open http://127.0.1.2:80

Step 2: configure virtual host with apache
here we will configure our newly added virtual domain against apache as a virtual host, and did I forget to say, with mod_rewrite enabled 🙂

goto /etc/apache2/sites-available and create a file named “ilove.php” – I recommend to keep it the same name as your virtual domain.
sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/ilove.php

write the following contents inside. but please note to create the appropriate directory before linking your virtual host with that, for example we’ve create a folder named “/home/<user name>/www/ilovephp” and linked that directory as my document root in the following configuration file.

<VirtualHost 127.0.1.2:80>
	ServerName ilove.php
	ServerAlias www.ilove.php
	ServerAdmin admin@ilove.php
	DocumentRoot /home/<user>/www/ilovephp
	<Directory /home/<user>/www/ilovephp>
		Options FollowSymLinks
		AllowOverride All
	</Directory>

</VirtualHost>

now create a symbolic link of this file to /etc/apache2/sites-enabled directory as “ilove.php”

sudo ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/ilove.php /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/ilove.php

Step 3: restart apache (or reload)
simple, either one of the followings
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

or

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload

or

sudo a2ensite ilove.php

and you are done! now you can point your browser to http://ilove.php

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