Setup Apache Virtual Hosts on Ubuntu 18.04

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Setup Apache Virtual Hosts on Ubuntu 18.04 – Google Cloud. Apache Virtual Hosts allows you to configure your domain name on the server with specific document root, security policies, SSL and much more.

You can also configure more than one website on a single server with multiple Virtual Host configurations.

Table of Contents

This setup is tested on an instance running Ubuntu 18.04 with Apache 2 installed on Google Cloud. So, this guide will be useful to configure Virtual hosts on any cloud services like AWS, Azure and any VPS or Dedicated servers.

Prerequisites

A running Compute Engine, see the Setting up Compute Engine Instance with Ubuntu 18.04
Initial Ubuntu Server Set up.
Setup Google Cloud DNS for your Domain name.

Create the Directory Structure

The document root is the directory where the website files for a domain name are stored. You can set the document root to any location you wish, in this guide you will use the following directory structure.

/var/www/html
├── example.com
│   └── public
├── domain2.com
│   └── public
├── domain3.com
│   └── public

We can create a separate directory for each domain we want to host on our server inside the /var/www/html directory. Within each of these directories, we will create a public directory that will store the source code of each websites.

We shall use example.com domain name as a demo for this setup.

sudo mkdir -p /var/www/example.com/public

Now create a new index.html file inside the document root, that is /var/www/html/example.com/public

Create a demo file using nano editor.

sudo nano /var/www/example.com/public/index.html

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en" dir="ltr">
  <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <title>Welcome to example.com</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>Success! example.com home page!</h1>
  </body>
</html>

As we are running the commands as a sudo user and the newly created files and directories are owned by the root user.

So you need to change the permission of the document root directory to the Apache user (www-data) .

sudo chmod -R 755 /var/www/html/example.com
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html/example.com

Create Virtual Host

By default on Ubuntu systems, Apache Virtual Hosts configuration files are stored in /etc/apache2/sites-available directory and can be enabled by creating symbolic links to the /etc/apache2/sites-enabled directory.

Open your editor of choice and create the following basic Virtual Host configuration file

sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/example.conf

<VirtualHost *:80>
     ServerName example.com
     ServerAlias www.example.com
     ServerAdmin [email protected]
     DocumentRoot /var/www/html/example.com/public

     <Directory /var/www/html/example.com/public>
         Options -Indexes +FollowSymLinks
         AllowOverride All
     </Directory>

     ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/example.com-error.log
     CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/example.com-access.log combined
 </VirtualHost>

ServerName: This is your domain name.
ServerAlias: All other domains that should match for this virtual host as well, such as the www subdomain.
DocumentRoot: The directory from which Apache will serve the domain files.
Options: This directive controls which server features are available on the specific directory.
- -Indexes: Prevents directory listings.
- FollowSymLinks: This option tells your web server to follow the symbolic links.
AllowOverride: Allows to configure and override the settings using .htaccess file
ErrorLog, CustomLog: Specifies the location for log files.

To enable the new virtual host file we need to create a symbolic link from the virtual host file to the sites-enabled directory, which is read by apache2 during startup.

The easiest way to enable the virtual host is by using the a2ensite helper tool.

sudo a2ensite example.conf

Once the configuration is enabled, test the configuration for any syntax errors with the following command.

sudo apachectl configtest

If there are no errors you will see the following output.

Syntax OK

Restart the Apache for the changes to take effect.

sudo service apache2 restart

To verify that everything is working as expected, open http://example.com in your browser to view the output of the index.html file created above.

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