Setup Dynamic Virtual Host (Apache2 on Ubuntu) - apache

Question

I want to set up a single virtual host that can dynamically handle all requests based on the hostname used to access it. If %{HTTP_HOST} could be used in a DocumentRoot, this is probably exactly what I want:
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin me#example.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/live/%{HTTP_HOST}/public
<Directory />
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
</Directory>
<Directory /var/www/live/%{HTTP_HOST}/public>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
allow from all
</Directory>
# Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit, alert, emerg.
LogLevel warn
ErrorLog /var/www/live/%{HTTP_HOST}/logs/error.log
CustomLog /var/www/live/%{HTTP_HOST}/logs/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>
...unfortunately, %{HTTP_HOST} is not allowed in the DocumentRoot (Warning: DocumentRoot [/var/www/live/%{HTTP_HOST}/public] does not exist). How else can I achieve my goal?
Update: I thought of pointing a catch-all vhost to a single directory and having a .htaccess use mod_rewrite to dynamically select the path but (honestly) I'm exhausted. I'll try at it again in the morning, but in the meantime, if anyone has good ideas, I'd love to hear them! Thank you!

Answer 1

Maybe you can try the following solution from this article: Apache: Dynamic Virtual Hosts
A few months back I looked for a solution to overcome the problem of
creating individual Virtual Hosts in Apache every time I wanted to
configure a new site on a development machine (something that is a big
issue in work where we have a lot of websites). Apache is able to
support this functionality relatively easy using a module and a few
lines in the configuration file. I set this up on Fedora 14, so
results may be slightly different for other OS's (different paths,
configuration file setup, etc)
Open up the main Apache conf (/etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf), and ensure
the module mod_vhost_alias is enabled. There should be a line in the
configuration like
LoadModule vhost_alias_module modules/mod_vhost_alias.so
Next, add the
following lines to the bottom of this file. You'll need to edit the
file with sudo privileges.
NameVirtualHost *:80
UseCanonicalName Off
<VirtualHost *:80>
VirtualDocumentRoot /var/www/html/domains/%0
</VirtualHost>
This sets up a catch all for any domain coming in over port 80 (the
default port for http traffic, if your using https you will need to
use 443 - alternatively you could remove the port restriction). The
important line here is the VirtualDocumentRoot. The tells Apache where
your files will reside on disk. The %0 part takes the whole domain
name and inserts it into the path. To illustrate this if we went to a
domain testing.com.dev the VirtualDocumentRoot would be:
/var/www/html/domains/testing.com.dev
This type of configuration might
be suitable for most situations, however I didn't want to have the
.dev part of the domain in my folders on disk. I was able to achieve
this by setting the VirtualDocumentRoot to:
VirtualDocumentRoot /var/www/html/domains/%-2+
The above example of testing.com.dev would now point to:
/var/www/html/domains/testing.com
Remember to add the domain to your
hosts file (/etc/hosts)
For a full list of options see the mod_vhost_alias documentation.
Additional documentation can be found here.

Answer 2

The official methods for achieving dynamic virtual hosts are explained in the Apache documentation:
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/vhosts/mass.html