Roland's blog

Ubuntu Server comes with an interesting way of handling virtualhosts/sites. There are two folders /etc/apache2/sites-available and /etc/apache2/sites-enabled. You can enable and disable using respectively a2ensite and a2disite.

With wildcards introduced into DNS sometime ago, you can take advantage of vhosts_alias modue. You can install it using:

sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-vhost-hash-alias
sudo a2enmod vhost_alias

The cool thing about this module is that it allows you to easily create subdomains.

To enable your domain you create a file in /etc/apache2/sites-available/www.mydomain.com.conf which can contain something like the virtualhost below, and enable with

sudo a2ensite www.mydomain.com.conf

and finally reload apache with

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName www.mydomain.com
  ServerAlias mydomain.com
  ServerAdmin my.email@mydomain.com
  DocumentRoot /var/www/mydomain/www
  ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/www.mydomain.com.error.log
  CustomLog /var/log/apache2/www.mydomain.com.access.log combined
  <Directory /var/www/mydomain>
    AllowOverride All
  </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Next, you want to add all sorts of subdomains to show off your projects.

Create another configuration file: /etc/apache2/sites-available/aaa.virtual.mydomain.com.conf . Note the naming of the file, the "aaa" is not chosen in vain. The alphabetical order of the names matters. All your aliased VirtualHost need to come before any other regular VirtualHost. Add something like this in the config file.

To allow the web server process to write to a file, I find myself doing this a lot:

find . -type f | xargs chmod 606

The problem is that some files have spaces in them and it screws up the command. You can force the delimiter to be the NULL pointer instead of space using the following command:

find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 chmod 606

and for directories

find . -type d -print0 | xargs -0 chmod 707