The web server of Apache is the most popular way to deliver web content. It serves over half of all active websites in the Internet and is extremely powerful and flexible.
Apache divides its features and components into separate units, which can be independently customized and set up. A virtual Host is called the basic unit describing a single site or domain. Virtual hosts allow one server, through a matching system, to host several domains or interfaces. This is important for those who want to host more than one VPS site.
Each configured domain will direct the visitor to a certain directory that contains information on this website without indicating that the same server is also responsible for other websites. This scheme can be expanded without software limits provided the traffic of all the sites is handled by your server.
[root@Microhost]# yum -y install httpd
Now the Apache server has been installed. We will enable the apache service so that it will automatically up in boot time.
[root@Microhost]# systemctl enable httpd.service
Now we will start the service of apache server by following command:
[root@Microhost]# systemctl start httpd.service
Our document root is set to individual directories in the /var/www directory and is the top level directory that Apache looks to find the content to serve. For each of the virtual host we plan to make, we will create a directory here.
We will create a public html directory that contains our current files in each of these directories.
These directories can be made by the mkdir command (using the -p flag to create a folder with a nested folder inside it):
[root@Microhost]# mkdir -p /var/www/domain1.com/public_html
[root@Microhost]# mkdir -p /var/www/domain2.com/public_html
We should also change some of our permissions to ensure that the general web directory and all the files and folders inside are allowed access to pages so that they can be served correctly:
[root@Microhost]# chmod -R 755 /var/www
You should now have the permissions on your web server to serve content and the content of the corresponding folders should be created by your user.
Let us now create some content to serve, as we now have a directory structure in place.
Our pages are very simple because this is only for demonstration and testing. For each site that identifies the given domain, we will only make an index.php page.
Start with domain1.com. Let’s start. In our editor, we can open an index.php file by typing:
[root@Microhost]# vi /var/www/domain1.com/public_html/index.php
copy the below content and paste it into the file.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<body>
<h1>My first PHP page</h1>
<?php
echo "Hello World!";
?>
</body>
</html>Save the file using :wq and exit from the text editor.
We can perform the above steps for domain2 also, only we have to create a file on domain2.com location as given below:
[root@Microhost]# vi /var/www/domain2.com/public_html/index.php
copy the below content and paste it into the file.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<body>
<h1>My Second PHP page</h1>
<?php
echo "Hello World!";
?>
</body>
</html>Save the file and exit from the text editor.
This is the virtual host file to specify how the Apache web server is to answer the various domain requests and how our separate websites are configured.
In order for us to start by setting the directory in which our virtual hosts are saved, and the directory in which Apache is told that the virtual host is ready to serve visitors. All of our virtual host files are maintained by the sites-available directory, while the sites-enabled directory has symbolic links to virtual hosts that we want to publish. By typing, we can create both directories:
[root@Microhost]# mkdir /etc/httpd/sites-available
[root@Microhost]# mkdir /etc/httpd/sites-enabled
In sites-enabled directory, we should tell Apache to search for virtual hosts. In order to achieve this, we will edit the main Apache configuration file and add an optional line for further configuration of files. We can edit the file by following command.
[root@Microhost]# /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
Add the following line at the end of the file content.
IncludeOptional sites-enabled/*.conf
save the file and exit from the text editor.
Create a configuration file for domain1.com at the below location.
[root@Microhost]# vi /etc/httpd/sites-available/domain1.com.conf
The configuration file should look like :
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName domain1.com
ServerAlias www.domain1.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/domain1.com/public_html
ErrorLog /var/www/domain1.com/error.log
CustomLog /var/www/domain1.com/requests.log combined
</VirtualHost>
save the file and exit from the text editor.
Now do the same process for another domain.
[root@Microhost]# vi /etc/httpd/sites-available/domain2.com.conf
The configuration file should look like
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName domain2.com
ServerAlias www.domain2.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/domain2.com/public_html
ErrorLog /var/www/domain2.com/error.log
CustomLog /var/www/domain2.com/requests.log combined
</VirtualHost>
save the file and exit from the text editor.
We must now enable our virtual host files so that Apache knows how to serve visitors. In this way, in the sites-enabled directory, we can create a symbolic link for each virtual host:
[root@Microhost]# ln -s /etc/httpd/sites-available/domain1.com.conf /etc/httpd/sites-enabled/domain1.com.conf
[root@Microhost]# ln -s /etc/httpd/sites-available/domain2.com.conf /etc/httpd/sites-enabled/domain2.com.conf
Now restart the apache services.
[root@Microhost]# systemctl restart httpd
Thank You 🙂