How To Set Up Apache Virtual Hosts

Introduction

The Apache HTTP server is a popular open-source web server that offers flexibility, power, and widespread support for developers. Apache server configuration does not take place in a single monolithic file, but instead happens through a modular design where new files can be added and modified as needed. Within this modular design, you can create an individual site or domain called a virtual host.

Using virtual hosts, one Apache instance can serve multiple websites. Each domain or individual site that is configured using Apache will direct the visitor to a specific directory holding that site’s information. This is done without indicating to the visitor that the same server is also responsible for other sites. This scheme is expandable without any software limit as long as your server can handle the load.

In this guide, you will set up Apache virtual hosts on an Ubuntu 20.04 server. During this process, you’ll learn how to serve different content to different visitors depending on which domains they are requesting by creating two virtual host sites.

Step 1 — Creating the Directory Structure

The first step is to create a directory structure that will hold the site data that you will be serving to visitors.

Your document root, the top-level directory that Apache looks at to find content to serve, will be set to individual directories under the /var/www directory. You will create a directory here for each of the virtual hosts.

Within each of these directories, you will create a public_html directory. The public_html directory contains the content that will be served to your visitors. The parent directories, named here as your_domain_1 and your_domain_2, will hold the scripts and application code to support the web content.

Use these commands, with your own domain names, to create your directories:

sudo mkdir -p /var/www/your_domain_1/public_html
sudo mkdir -p /var/www/your_domain_2/public_html

Be sure to replace your_domain_1 and your_domain_2 with your own respective domains. For example, if one of your domains was example.com you would create this directory structure: /var/www/example.com/public_html.

Step 2 — Granting Permissions

You’ve created the directory structure for your files, but they are owned by the root user. If you want your regular user to be able to modify files in these web directories, you can change the ownership with these commands:

sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /var/www/your_domain_1/public_html
sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /var/www/your_domain_2/public_html

The $USER variable will take the value of the user you are currently logged in as when you press ENTER. By doing this, the regular user now owns the public_html subdirectories where you will be storing your content.

You should also modify your permissions to ensure that read access is permitted to the general web directory and all of the files and folders it contains so that the pages can be served correctly:

sudo chmod -R 755 /var/www

Your web server now has the permissions it needs to serve content, and your user should be able to create content within the necessary folders. The next step is to create content for your virtual host sites.

Step 3 — Creating Default Pages for Each Virtual Host

With your directory structure in place, you can start focusing on each individual virtual host site and the content within that site. Start by creating an index.html page for your first site your_domain_1.

Open and create the index.html file with your preferred text editor. This example uses nano:

nano /var/www/your_domain_1/public_html/index.html