Installing virtual hosts for Drupal sites and subsites

Last updated September 20, 2008. Created by betz on January 20, 2007.
Edited by kanani, sepeck, tarek. Log in to edit this page.

The purpose of this guide is to concisely summarize how to implement apache vhost settings for each site or subsite.

All steps for this tutorial were implemented with Debian using Apache version 2.0.54.

Gain entrance into your shell system, and su to root or another user that can edit apache2 configuration files.
Go to your apache configuration files:
cd /etc/apache2/sites-available
Create a configuration file for your new site. For an example site, www.example.com, we make the site as such:
nano example.com
<VirtualHost *:80> ServerAdmin me@myserver DocumentRoot /home/web/drupal/ ServerName www.example.com ServerAlias example.com *.example.com RewriteEngine On RewriteOptions inherit CustomLog /var/log/apache2/example.com.log combined </VirtualHost> <VirtualHost *:443> ServerAdmin me@myserver DocumentRoot /home/web/drupal/ ServerName www.example.com ServerAlias example.com *.example.com RewriteEngine On RewriteOptions inherit CustomLog /var/log/apache2/example.com.log combined # SSL Specific options SSLEngine on SSLCipherSuite ALL:!ADH:!EXPORT56:RC4+RSA:+HIGH:+MEDIUM:+LOW:+SSLv2:+EXP:+eNULL SSLCertificateFile /etc/ssl/apache/CA.crt SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/ssl/apache/CA.key SetEnvIf User-Agent ".*MSIE.*" nokeepalive ssl-unclean-shutdown </VirtualHost>
Activate the site's configuration:
a2ensite www.example.com
Reload Apache's configuration:
/etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload

Done!

If you get an apache error '/home/www/drupal5/.htaccess: Option Indexes not allowed here'
Assuming that my apache2 DocumentRoot is at /home/www,
and that drupal is linked to the doc root by
ln -s /usr/share/drupal5 /home/www/

add the following to /etc/apache2/conf.d/drupal.conf

<Directory /home/www/drupal5/>
Options +FollowSymLinks Indexes
AllowOverride All
order allow,deny
allow from all
</Directory>

Comments

Worked for me. Thank you

Posted by ArthurGruzauskas on July 14, 2007 at 2:22am

Worked for me. Thank you very much. The only trouble was an apache error '/home/www/drupal5/.htaccess: Option Indexes not allowed here'
Assuming that my apache2 DocumentRoot is at /home/www,
and that drupal is linked to the doc root by
ln -s /usr/share/drupal5 /home/www/

my fix is adding the following to /etc/apache2/conf.d/drupal.conf

<Directory /home/www/drupal5/>
	Options +FollowSymLinks Indexes
	AllowOverride All
	order allow,deny
	allow from all
</Directory>

In actual fact, i found the above could replace the file /etc/apache2/conf.d/drupal.conf, as the old
contents didnt seem to do anything for me. It works either as an addition or a replacement for me.

Hmm...didn't work

Posted by corydorning on April 13, 2009 at 6:58pm

I got an error saying:
"Syntax error on line 9 of /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/mysite: Invalid command 'RewriteEngine', perhaps misspelled or defined by a module not included in the server configuration...fail"

www.corydorning.com

Enable mod-rewrite on apache2

Posted by mchrisneglia on August 12, 2010 at 7:40pm

I realize this is a yr old necropost, but if anyone gets this error this may be helpful- I get this error also on new installs. You will have to enable mod-rewrite module in apache. It should be included with the package in debian/ubuntu, but by default is not enabled.

$ cd /var/apache2/mods-enabled
$ sudo ln -s ../mods-available/rewrite.load rewrite.load
$ sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Web Programmer
http://www.page1solutions.com/

Shell scripts for Drupal and virtual hosts install

Posted by den.iver on February 23, 2011 at 7:27pm

The densite script (aka the a2ensite debian script) can be found at http://www.drupal.org/project/densite The densite script does the same things as the instructions given above (and some more: e.g. list your sites, populate database from a dump on install, or import dumps from other of your sites. It can also install directly via download and set up mysql or postgresql databases, setup the virtual host and then reload apache. It is intended to work out of the box on Debian machines. Just dump the densite folder in your drush command folder and it should work right away on Debian based machines (Tested on ubuntu .8.10 intreped and and Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy)

http://www.os-cms.net