How to setup name-based virtual host on Ubuntu server.

I’m moving my site from fatcow.com to linode.com because I setup VPS on linode so I’ll have more control of it. The first step is to setup name-based virtual host so that I can link my sub-domains to my “www” sub-directories.

1. Create DNS records for domains and sub-domains. The IP address of sub-domains can be the same as your main domain.

2. Now the world know how to resolve your domain name to an IP address, next step is to create name-based virtual host on Ubuntu server so that we can host different sites on different sub-domains. I want to create 2 sites. One is my main domain which host my blog www.ycshao.com, another one is for testing purpose image.ycshao.com.

3. Enable name-based virtual host on Ubuntu:

   $ vim /etc/apache2/ports.conf

   and add following line to the end if it’s not there

   NameVirtualHost *:80

4. There are two folders in /etc/apache2, which are sites-available and sites-enabled. Usually sites-enabled folder will have soft link to files in sites-available folder. The folder names are pretty obvious, “available” means available sites and “enabled” means  sites which can be accessed. Let’s start from scratch.

   $ cd /etc/apache2/sites-available # Go to directory
   $ cp default wordpress # Make a copy of default setting file
   $ vim wordpress

   and modify first few lines to

   <VirtualHost *:80>
       ServerAdmin ycshao0402@gmail.com
       ServerName www.ycshao.com
       ServerAlias ycshao.com
       DocumentRoot /var/www/wordpress
       ...
   <virtualHost>

   The most important things are your “ServerName” corresponding to url you want to set and “DocumentRoot” corresponding to which directory this url points to. Then make a soft link to enable this site:

   $ ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/wordpress /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/wordpress
   $ service apache2 restart

5. Now you should be able to access www.ycshao.com and it should go to my wordpress blog sitting in /var/www/wordpress.

6. Now repeat step 4 for image.ycshao.com and other sites you want to configure.