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How To Set Up Apache Virtual Hosts on Ubuntu 20.04

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A Virtual Host is an Apache configuration directive that allows you to run more than one website on a single server. With Virtual Hosts, you can specify the site document root (the directory containing the website files), create a separate security policy for each site, use different SSL certificates, and much more.

This article describes how to set up Apache Virtual Hosts on Ubuntu 20.04.

Prerequisites

Ensure that you have met the following requirements before continuing with the guide:

Creating the Directory Structure

The document root is the directory where the website files for a domain name are stored and served in response to requests. You can set the document root to any location you want, in this example, we will use the following directory structure:

/var/www/
├── domain1.com
│   └── public_html
├── domain2.com
│   └── public_html

Each domain hosted on the server will have its document root set to /var/www/<domain_name>/public_html.

Start by creating the root directory for the domain:

sudo mkdir -p /var/www/domain1.com/public_html

We’ll also create an index.html file inside the domain document root directory that will be shown when you visit the domain in your browser:

/var/www/domain1.com/public_html/index.html
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en" dir="ltr">
  <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <title>Welcome to domain1.com</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>Success! domain1.com home page!</h1>
  </body>
</html>

Since the commands above are executed as a sudo user, the newly created files and directories are owned by root. To avoid any permission issues change the ownership of the domain document root directory and all files within the directory to the apache user (www-data) :

sudo chown -R www-data: /var/www/domain1.com

Creating a Virtual Hosts

On Ubuntu systems, Apache Virtual Hosts configuration files are located in /etc/apache2/sites-available directory. They can be enabled by creating symbolic links to the /etc/apache2/sites-enabled directory, which Apache read during the startup.

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

/etc/apache2/sites-available/domain1.com.conf
<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName domain1.com
    ServerAlias www.domain1.com
    ServerAdmin webmaster@domain1.com
    DocumentRoot /var/www/domain1.com/public_html

    <Directory /var/www/domain1.com/public_html>
        Options -Indexes +FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride All
    </Directory>

    ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/domain1.com-error.log
    CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/domain1.com-access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

You can name the configuration file as you like, but the best practice is to use the domain name as the name of the virtual host configuration file.

To enable the new virtual host file, use the a2ensite helper script which creates a symbolic link from the virtual host file to the sites-enabled directory:

sudo a2ensite domain1.com

The other option is to manually create a symlink as shown below:

sudo ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/domain1.com.conf /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/

Once done, test the configuration for any syntax errors with:

sudo apachectl configtest

If there are no errors, you will see the following output:

Syntax OK

Restart the Apache service for the changes to take effect:

sudo systemctl restart apache2

Finally to verify that everything is working as expected, open http://domain1.com in your browser, and you will see the content of the index.html page:

Conclusion

You have learned how to create an apache virtual host configuration to host multiple domains on a single Ubuntu server.

Repeat the steps we outlined above to create additional virtual hosts for all your domains.

If you are facing any problem, feel free to leave a comment.

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