Symfony - name based virtual servers on localhost - is this possible? - apache

Question

I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that this is not feasible, although for some reason, people - most likely who have not implemented the 'advice' they give, seem to think this is possible.
The scenario is quite straightforward. I am developing symfony websites on my local dev machine, running Ubuntu 10.0.4 LTS. I want to be able to run and test multiple sites locally.
Assuming I have the following sites:
site1.localhost
site2.localhost
site3.localhost
Following the documentation here, here and here (none of which work for me), I have done the following:
A. I modified my /etc/hosts file with the first entry to be:
127.0.0.1 site1.localhost site2.localhost hpdtp-ubuntu910
localhost php.localhost
B. I modified my /etc/apache2/ports.conf file (first lines) as follows:
NameVirtualHost localhost:80 Listen 80
C. I have created configuration sites for each of the websites (site1.localhost and site2.localhost). Each configuration is a separate file in /etc/apache2/sites-available
One such configuration file (for site1.localhost) in /etc/apache2/sites-available/site1 looks like this:
<VirtualHost localhost:80>
ServerName site1.localhost
DocumentRoot "/home/morpheous/work/webdev/frameworks/symfony/sites/site1/web"
DirectoryIndex index.php
<Directory "/home/morpheous/work/webdev/frameworks/symfony/sites/site1/web">
AllowOverride All
Allow from All
</Directory>
Alias /sf /lib/vendor/symfony/symfony-1.3.6/data/web/sf
<Directory "/lib/vendor/symfony/symfony-1.3.6/data/web/sf">
AllowOverride All
Allow from All
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>
D. I have disabled the default apache site by using (it kept showing up instead)
E. Since I can't enable all the sites I enable to work (like the documentation links above
purport), I have settled for enabling one site at a time, so that Apache dosen't get its confused as to which site to run. When I need to run another site, I disable the current one and enable the one I want to. This is (obviously?) far from ideal - but even this setup is not working - for the reasons listed below.
i). When I restart Apache, I get the following warning:
Reloading web server config apache2
[Sun Jul 18 10:32:23 2010] [warn]
NameVirtualHost localhost:80 has no
VirtualHosts
ii). when I navigate to http://site1.localhost
I get the following error message in FF:
Oops! This link appears to be broken
iii). My apache related errors are appearing in /var/log/apachche2/other_vosts.log
morpheous#hpdtp-ubuntu910:~$ tail /var/log/apache2/other_vhosts_access.log
site1.localhost:80 127.0.0.1 - - [18/Jul/2010:10:08:38 +0100] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 404 506 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-GB; rv:1.9.2.6) Gecko/20100628 Ubuntu/10.04 (lucid) Firefox/3.6.6 GTB7.1"
site1.localhost:80 127.0.0.1 - - [18/Jul/2010:10:09:30 +0100] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 404 506 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-GB; rv:1.9.2.6) Gecko/20100628 Ubuntu/10.04 (lucid) Firefox/3.6.6 GTB7.1"
site1.localhost:80 127.0.0.1 - - [18/Jul/2010:10:09:31 +0100] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 404 505 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-GB; rv:1.9.2.6) Gecko/20100628 Ubuntu/10.04 (lucid) Firefox/3.6.6 GTB7.1"
site1.localhost:80 127.0.0.1 - - [18/Jul/2010:10:09:36 +0100] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 404 505 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-GB; rv:1.9.2.6) Gecko/20100628 Ubuntu/10.04 (lucid) Firefox/3.6.6 GTB7.1"
My questions are:
Can Apache be setup to handle multiple virtual hosts on localhost? Afterall, all examples I have seen so far involve setting Apache with public facing ip addresses
If Apache can indeed handle multiple sites on localhost, which of the steps above am I doing incorrectly?. AFAICT, I have followed the documentation to the letter.

Answer 1

Yes, you can have several VirtualHosts, on your local machine -- It's exactly the same as when working on a remote server, except the IP address and domain-name are not the same.
What I generally do is :
Edit the hosts file
To add the new domain-names that I want served from my local computer.
For example, I would add :
127.0.0.1 tests
127.0.0.1 blog
And so on, with one line for each domain-name I want.
Add new VirtualHosts to Apache's configuration
Then, I add new VirtualHosts to Apache's configuration.
First site : tests
For example, for my tests domain-name, I would use :
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName tests
DocumentRoot /home/squale/developpement/tests
<Directory /home/squale/developpement/tests>
AllowOverride All
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
allow from all
</Directory>
ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/error.log
</VirtualHost>
A couple of things to note here :
The VirtualHost is on *:80
So, it'll listen to any address
The mapping to the domain-name is made by the ServerName directive
Of course, up to you to make sure that this VirtualHost is seen by Apache -- either by placing it's configuration in a loaded file (not recommended), or by :
Placing that configuration in a new file in /etc/apache2/sites-available/
Using a2ensite to enable the site
Which will create a symbolic-link in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/, pointing to your new configuration file.
Second site : blog
And here the configuration I'd use for a second domain-name, that correspond to blog :
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName blog
DocumentRoot /home/squale/developpement/blog.pascal-martin.fr/www
<Directory /home/squale/developpement/blog.pascal-martin.fr/www>
AllowOverride All
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
allow from all
</Directory>
ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/error.log
</VirtualHost>
It's basically exactly the same thing ; only two differences :
The ServerName directive correspond to my second domain-name -- of course
And the DocumentRoot is not the same
Other files ?
I don't really change anything else to Apache's default configuration (I'm on Ubuntu, if that matters).
For example, I don't change anything in the ports.conf file : I still have the default NameVirtualHost and Listen directives :
NameVirtualHost *:80
Listen 80
Only important modifications I do are to enable some modules, like rewrite, expires, ... But that's not much related to your VirtualHosts problem ;-)
Results ?
If I open my browser and go to http://tests/, I get the things I would expect from my tests domain -- a list of directories and files, here.
And if I open my browser and go to http://blog/, I get the development instance of my blog -- well, and error page, saying that I forgot to set up the database ^^

Answer 2

Did you create a link from /etc/apache2/sites-available/site1 to /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/site1 ?
I'm using nginx instead of apache but ubuntu has standarized way of configuration. Usually sites-available includes all your configurations which are not included by apache. It only looks for configurations linked in sites-enabled directory.
I also don't think you need to enable one site a time. All should work. All have different domain names.