Apache local configuration to resolve files correctly - apache

Question

I have just configured Apache and PHP to work on my local Mac OS X computer. Now PHP works fine, except when I try to load the files for my live sites. The live sites have separate directories and are sorted by client name etc.
I've created symlinks in the default root for the local web server documents. My issue is that Apache doesn't seem to want to load any of the relative paths that are found in the HTML pages. For example, I have src="/css/main.css" but Apache doesn't load the file, similarly for images, it just resolves as a file not found 404 error. I then thought it might be the symlinks so I copied the full directory into the Apache document root, and still had the same result.
I would really love to setup my local development environment to run Apache, PHP, MySQL to develop locally then publish when ready. I also tried the MAMP installation, and had the same issues.

Answer 1

First you might want to try using src="./css/main.css".
When dealing with multiple live sites I like to setup a single configuration file for each site with apache and then load them all together in the httpd.conf file.
for my setup it looks like this:
in
/etc/apache2/httpd.conf
I have:
# Begin virtual host directives.
Include conf/bortreb.conf
Include conf/rlmcintyre.conf
Include conf/laserkard.conf
Include conf/judyates.conf
and then in
/etc/apache2/conf/judyates.conf
I have:
<VirtualHost *:80>
#localhost site
ServerAdmin email#example.com
DocumentRoot "/home/r/Desktop/web/judyates"
ServerName localhost
ServerAlias judyates.localhost
ErrorLog "/home/r/Desktop/web/judyates/log/error_log.log"
ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ "/home/r/Desktop/web/judyates/cgi-bin/"
<Directory "/home/r/Desktop/web/judyates">
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
Options +ExecCGI
AddHandler cgi-script cgi pl py
AllowOverride Options
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>
<VirtualHost *:80>
#live site
ServerAdmin email#example.com
DocumentRoot "/home/r/Desktop/web/judyates"
ServerName judyates.com
ServerAlias *.judyates.com
ErrorLog "/home/r/Desktop/web/judyates/log/error_log.log"
ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ "/home/r/Desktop/web/judyates/cgi-bin/"
<Directory "/home/r/Desktop/web/judyates">
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
Options +ExecCGI
AddHandler cgi-script cgi pl py
AllowOverride Options
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>
This way works really well, because you can set the subdomain yoursite.localhost
to loop back to your home ip address.
With this setup, when I work on judyates.com on my computer and want to test anythig, I just go to judyates.localhost in my web browser.
I have about 5 other sites all set up this way in their own *.conf file, so they can each live in their own directories on my computer that exactly match the directories they'll be in on the server.
The key is to use virtual hosts to go to different sites based on the subdomain.
You can learn how to configure subdomains that point to yourself here:
http://digitalpbk.blogspot.com/2007/01/making-subdomains-on-localhost.html
My setup goes even one step further because I setup the server too. Whenever I want to update I load both the webfiles AND the apache config files, and that way the server exactly mirrors my local setup. The only difference is that the real judyates.com points to the server and not my home computer, so when people try to visit the site they get everything from the server.

Answer 2

Have you tried src="css/main.css"? That is, without the leading slash? If you have a leading slash there your files would have to be in a directory named css that was in the root directory of the webserver, and if I understand you correctly that's not the case.
EDIT: OK, from reading your comments it seems like you are not quite clear on how relative urls work. "/css/main.css" is not relative to the page's location in the directory tree. It means a file named "main.css" in a directory named "css" in the root directory of the webserver. When you put your files on the deployment server your css directory is at the webserver's root directory. But it sounds like you are currently putting the css directory in a subdirectory named for the client... so your css file is now living at "/clientname/css/main.css".
If I understand you correctly, you can do what you want by using relative urls. If your html file is in the same directory as the css directory you would need "css/main.css". If it's in a subdirectory of the directory that contains the css directory you would need "../css/main.css"- the ".." means the parent directory of the current directory. If you use relative urls they will continue to work as long as the relationship between the files doesn't change.
Here's a page on the subject that explains it adequately, I think: http://www.webreference.com/html/tutorial2/3.html. Was pretty much the first thing I found in Google though, so there are likely better explanations out there.
There are a number of Apache directives that you could use to do this, but if using relative urls would work for you (and if I understand you correctly it would) then that's likely to be a lot simpler and less likely to cause you further trouble.