Multiple domains on apache server

Question

First a quick disclaimer, I'm not a 'server guy' or a 'unix pro' or anything like that, I'm a web programmer who got stuck doing server works since I ran linux (ubuntu) on my netbook.

I'm trying to set up an apache server running on Debian to automagically serve multiple domains, each domain needs to have its own directory in /var/www.

Since this is the last thing I do for this company I really need it to be easy for my successor (who is even more a beginner at servers than I am), to create more domains without having to muck around with ssh or /etc/apache2/sites-available, so what I'm looking for is basically any magic mumbo-jumbo in default (or apt-get, or conf.d) that makes the server start serving any domain that has a matching folder in /var/www they will ofcourse have to initiate domain transfers the usual way.

I have no problem setting up domains individually.

Ick... hope the above makes sense to someone.

Answer 1

Untested Code with flavor of Ubuntu

sudo a2enmod rewrite
vi /etc/apache/sites-enabled/000-default

NameVirtualHost *
<VirtualHost *>
        DocumentRoot /var/www/
        RewriteEngine On
        RewriteRule ^(.*)$ %{HTTP_HOST}/$1
</VirtualHost>


sudo /etc/inid.d/apache2 restart

Answer 2

To serve multiple domains from Apache, you'll need Apache Virtual Hosts. You can start serving any domain that has a matching folder in /var/www" with Apache Virtual Hosts using mod_vhost_alias.

The following configuration will take the fully-qualified domain name (like www.example.org) and use it as the variable '%0'. So, to serve out 'www.example.org', you create a directory at /var/www/www.example.org/docs , and place your HTML content there. Your Cgi script will go in /var/www/www.example.org/cgi-bin/

<VirtualHost 192.168.1.100:80>

# get the server name from the Host: header
UseCanonicalName Off

VirtualDocumentRoot /var/www/%0/docs
VirtualScriptAlias /var/www/%0/cgi-bin

</VirtualHost>

Then, point 'www.example.org' to '192.168.1.100', and Apache will happily serve that Virtual Host.