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How to setup Virtual Host in Ubuntu 11.10 via terminal or Putty
Table of contents
This article is a personal recollection of what I did when I installed a virtual host in my remote instance server running Ubuntu 11.10. It is presumed that Apache server is setup and running. Also make sure that the domain name’s A record in the DNS Management of your domain name, is already pointing to the IP address of the instance server, otherwise, you may edit your hostfile to temporarily point your domain to your server’s IP address, locally.
Go to /etc/apache2/sites-available/
cd /etc/apache2/sites-available
Create site configuration
Create a configuration file for the virtual host that you want to create. I used the domain name (as the filename) which points to the said virtual host - in this case, timothyae.com as a filename. Any filename will do. To create/edit, you can use any editor that you want. I used nano. Also, you need a “super user” permission.
sudo nano timothyae.com
The timothyae.com above can be renamed to whatever filename you want such as timothyae.com.conf, if you want that kind of setup.
In the nano editor, input the following basic configuration.
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName timothyae.com
ServerAlias www.timothyae.com
ServerAdmin [email protected]
DocumentRoot /var/timothyae.com/html
</VirtualHost>
Save changes to the file ^X.
Make sure that the DocumentRoot is an existing directory, otherwise, create it.
cd /var
sudo mkdir -p timothyae.com
sudo chown timothy timothyae.com
chmod 777 timothyae.com
cd timothyae.com
mkdir -p html
The above, sets current directory (cd) to the /var and creates (mkdir) timothyae.com directory. chown, changes the ownership of timothyae.com directory from super user (since we created the directory using sudo) to timothy. Don’t forget to change timothy to your username. chmod changes permission of timothyae.com directory to a public directory. As you see here, I did not use sudo anymore because the target directory is already owned by timothy.
Enable configuration
Now that we have the virtual host configuration file and the directories setup, we can now enable the site.
sudo a2ensite timothyae.com
It is sudo a2ensite timothyae.com because our configuration file is timothyae.com. In case you want to disable your site, the opposite of a2ensite is a2dissite. Note that enabling and disabling a site configuration will make changes in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled by creating a symlink there.
Restart apache
sudo service apache2 restart
Check your site
After restarting Apache, go to /var/timothyae.com/html/ and add a file index.html or index.php. Add some text inside it and check your website in your browser.