How To Configure Apache Virtual Hosts In Ubuntu 18.04 LTS - OSTechNix

What is Apache Virtual Hosts?

Virtual Host term refers to the method of running more than one website such as host1.domain.com, host2.domain.com, or www.domain1.com, www.domain2.com etc., on a single system. There are two types of Virtual Hosting in Apache, namely IP-based virtual hosting and name-based virtual hosting. With IP-based virtual hosting, you can host multiple websites or domains on the same system, but each website/domain has different IP address. With name-based virtual hosting, you can host multiple websites/domains on the same IP address. Virtual hosting can be useful if you want to host multiple websites and domains from a single physical server or VPS. Hope you got the basic idea of Apache virtual hosts. Today, we are going to see how to configure Apache virtual hosts in Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

Configure Apache Virtual Hosts in Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

My test box IP address is 192.168.225.22 and host name is ubuntuserver.

First, we will see how to configure name-based virtual hosts in Apache webserver.

Configure name-based virtual hosts1. Install Apache webserver

Make sure you have installed Apache webserver. To install it on Ubuntu, run:

$ sudo apt-get install apache2

Once apache is installed, test if it is working or not by browsing the apache test page in the browser.

Open your web browser and point it to http://IP_Address or http://localhost. You should see a page like below.

Good! Apache webserver is up and working!!

2. Create web directory for each host

I am going to create two virtual hosts, namely ostechnix1.lan and ostechnix2.lan.

Let us create a directory for first virtual host ostechnix1.lan. This directory is required for storing the data of our virtual hosts.

To do so, enter:

$ sudo mkdir -p /var/www/html/ostechnix1.lan/public_html

Likewise, create a directory for second virtual host ostechnix2.lan as shown below.

$ sudo mkdir -p /var/www/html/ostechnix2.lan/public_html

The above two directories are owned by root user. We need to change the ownership to the regular user.

To do so, run:

$ sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /var/www/html/ostechnix1.lan/public_html$ sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /var/www/html/ostechnix2.lan/public_html

Here, $USER refers the currently logged-in user.

Next, set read permissions to the Apache root directory i.e /var/www/html/ using command:

$ sudo chmod -R 755 /var/www/html/

We do this because we already created a separate directory for each virtual host for storing their data. So we made the apache root directory as read only for all users except the root user.

We have created required directories for storing data of each virtual host, setup proper permissions. Now, it is time to create some sample pages which will be served from each virtual host.

3. Create demo web pages for each host

Let us create a sample page for ostechnix1.lan site. To do so, run:

$ sudo vi /var/www/html/ostechnix1.lan/public_html/index.html

Add the following lines in it:

www.ostechnix.lan

Hello, This is a test page for ostechnix1.lan website

Save and close the file.

Likewise, create a sample page for ostechnix2.lan site:

$ sudo vi /var/www/html/ostechnix2.lan/public_html/index.html

Add the following lines in it:

www.ostechnix.lan

Hello, This is a test page for ostechnix2.lan website

Save and close the file.

4. Create configuration file for each host

Next, we need to create configuration files for each virtual host. First, let us do this for ostechnix1.lan site.

Copy the default virtual host file called 000-default.conf contents to the new virtual host files like below.

$ sudo cp /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf /etc/apache2/sites-available/ostechnix1.lan.conf$ sudo cp /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf /etc/apache2/sites-available/ostechnix2.lan.conf

Please be mindful that you must save all configuration files with .conf extension at the end, otherwise it will not work.

Now, modify the configuration files to match with our virtual hosts.

Edit ostechnix.lan1.conf file:

$ sudo vi /etc/apache2/sites-available/ostechnix1.lan.conf

Edit/modify ServerAdmin, ServerName, ServerAlias and DocumentRoot values matches to virtual host.

# The ServerName directive sets the request scheme, hostname and port that # the server uses to identify itself. This is used when creating # redirection URLs. In the context of virtual hosts, the ServerName # specifies what hostname must appear in the request's Host: header to # match this virtual host. For the default virtual host (this file) this # value is not decisive as it is used as a last resort host regardless. # However, you must set it for any further virtual host explicitly. #ServerName www.example.comServerAdmin [email protected] ServerName ostechnix1.lan ServerAlias www.ostechnix1.lan DocumentRoot /var/www/html/ostechnix1.lan/public_html # Available loglevels: trace8, ..., trace1, debug, info, notice, warn, # error, crit, alert, emerg. # It is also possible to configure the loglevel for particular # modules, e.g. #LogLevel info ssl:warn ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined # For most configuration files from conf-available/, which are # enabled or disabled at a global level, it is possible to # include a line for only one particular virtual host. For example the # following line enables the CGI configuration for this host only # after it has been globally disabled with "a2disconf". #Include conf-available/serve-cgi-bin.conf

Save and close the file.

Next, edit ostechnix2.lan.conf file:

$ sudo vi /etc/apache2/sites-available/ostechnix2.lan.conf

Make the necessary changes.

# The ServerName directive sets the request scheme, hostname and port that # the server uses to identify itself. This is used when creating # redirection URLs. In the context of virtual hosts, the ServerName # specifies what hostname must appear in the request's Host: header to # match this virtual host. For the default virtual host (this file) this # value is not decisive as it is used as a last resort host regardless. # However, you must set it for any further virtual host explicitly. #ServerName www.example.comServerAdmin [email protected] ServerName ostechnix2.lan ServerAlias www.ostechnix2.lan DocumentRoot /var/www/html/ostechnix2.lan/public_html # Available loglevels: trace8, ..., trace1, debug, info, notice, warn, # error, crit, alert, emerg. # It is also possible to configure the loglevel for particular # modules, e.g. #LogLevel info ssl:warn ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined # For most configuration files from conf-available/, which are # enabled or disabled at a global level, it is possible to # include a line for only one particular virtual host. For example the # following line enables the CGI configuration for this host only # after it has been globally disabled with "a2disconf". #Include conf-available/serve-cgi-bin.conf

Save/close the file.

5. Enable virtual host configuration files

After making the necessary changes, disable the default virtual host config file i.e 000.default.conf, and enable all newly created virtual host config files as shown below.

$ sudo a2dissite 000-default.conf$ sudo a2ensite ostechnix1.lan.conf$ sudo a2ensite ostechnix2.lan.conf

Restart apache web server to take effect the changes.

$ sudo systemctl restart apache2

That's it. We have successfully configured virtual hosts in Apache. Let us go ahead and check whether they are working or not.

6. Test Virtual hosts

Open /etc/hosts file in any editor:

$ sudo vi /etc/hosts

Add all your virtual websites/domains one by one like below.

[...]192.168.225.22 ostechnix1.lan192.168.225.22 ostechnix2.lan[...]

Please note that if you want to access the virtual hosts from any remote systems, you must add the above lines in each remote system's /etc/hosts file.

Save and close the file.

Open up your web browser and point it to http://ostechnix1.lan or http://ostechnix2.lan.

ostechnix1.lan test page: ostechnix2.lan test page:

Congratulations! You can now be able to access your all websites. From now on, you can upload the data and serve them from different websites.

As you noticed, we have used the same IP address (i.e 192.168.225.22) for host two different websites (http://ostechnix1.lan and http://ostechnix2.lan). This is what we call name-based virtual hosting. Hope this helps. I will show you how to configure IP-based virtual hosting in the next guide. Until then, stay tuned!

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