How to make domain accessible with www on apache 2.4 - apache

Question

I want my laravel app accessible with or without www on the url. like [http://laracasts.com][1]. when I hit http://example.com it works. But when I hit http://www.example.com, or http://www.example.com/contact I'm getting 404 error. How can I solve this? I'm using apache 2.4.7 on Ubuntu and here's my example.com.conf
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName www.example.com
ServerAlias example.com
ServerAdmin foo#bar.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/myproject/public
<Directory /var/www/myproject/public/>
Options -Indexes +FollowSymLinks +MultiViews
AllowOverride All
Require all granted
</Directory>
ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/example-error.log
LogLevel warn
CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
#Include conf-available/serve-cgi-bin.conf
</VirtualHost>
and here's my /etc/hosts file
127.0.1.1 example
127.0.0.1 localhost
# The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts
::1 ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
xxxx::0 ip6-localnet
xxxx::0 ip6-mcastprefix
xxxx::1 ip6-allnodes
xxxx::2 ip6-allrouters
xxxx::3 ip6-allhosts
and .htaccess:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
<IfModule mod_negotiation.c>
Options -MultiViews
</IfModule>
RewriteEngine On
# Redirect Trailing Slashes...
RewriteRule ^(.*)/$ /$1 [L,R=301]
# Handle Front Controller...
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^ index.php [L]
</IfModule>
about server stuff, i'm noobs.

Answer 1

Your apache configuration is correct. However, you need to enable the rewrite module:
sudo a2enmod rewrite
sudo service apache2 restart
If you use a registered domain, this is enough. If you just use a "local" domain for development, you have to add this dumping domain into your hosts file at /etc/hosts. For example, when working with local environment, I usually use a domain .local, I'll add this line to make the domain example.local work:
127.0.0.1 example.local

Answer 2

You will need to include all the possible domain/subdomain name combinations that you would like to use in your hosts file.
127.0.0.1 www.example.com
127.0.0.1 example.com
In regards to http://www.example.com/contact does http://example.com/contact work?