Apache: The Definitive Guide, Second Edition

3.8. Virtual Hosts

On site.twocopy (see Section 3.9, later in this chapter) we run two different versions of Apache, each serving a different URL. It would be rather unusual to do this in real life. It is more common to run a number of virtual Apaches that steer incoming requests on different URLs—usually with the same IP address—to different sets of documents. These might well be home pages for members of your organization or your clients.

In the first edition of this book we showed how to do this for Apache 1.2 and HTTP/1.0. The result was rather clumsy, with a main host and a virtual host, but it coped with HTTP/1.0 clients. However, the setup can now be done much more neatly with the NameVirtualHost directive. The possible combinations of IP-based and name-based hosts can become quite complex. A full explanation with examples and the underlying theology can be found at http://www.apache.org/docs/vhosts but it has to be said that several of the possible permutations are unlikely to be very useful in practice.

3.8.1. Name-Based Virtual Hosts

This is by far the preferred method of managing virtual hosts, taking advantage of the ability of HTTP/1.1-compliant browsers to send the name of the site they want to access. At .../site.virtual/Name-based we have www.butterthlies.com and sales. butterthlies.com on 192.168.123.2. Of course, these sites must be registered on the Web (or if you are dummying the setup as we did, included in /etc/hosts). The Config file is as follows: ...