How To Set Up Apache Virtual Hosts on Ubuntu

This tutorial will walk you through setting up several domains and websites on an Ubuntu 18.04 server using Apache virtual hosts. You will gain knowledge on how to deliver various visitors with various types of material according to the domains they are asking during this procedure.

Please refer to How To Set Up Apache Virtual Hosts on Ubuntu 18.04 for a more thorough explanation of each step in this article.

You must have access to the following on an Ubuntu 18.04 server in order to finish this tutorial:

On your server, a sudo user
Installing an Apache2 web server with sudo apt install apache2

In order to serve users with the site data, we need to establish a directory structure in our top-level Apache directory. The highlighted domain names below will be used as examples. These should be swapped out for your actual domain names.

To allow our current non-root user to edit the files, we should now update the permissions.

In order for pages to be served correctly, we’ll also make sure that read access is allowed to the general web directory and all of the files and directories it contains.

Now that we have some material to serve, let’s develop an example index.html page for each site. We can use nano as a text editor to open the index.html file for our first website.

Create a domain-specific HTML document in this file that looks something like this:

Copy this file, save it, and then close it to serve as the foundation for our second website:

Additionally, save and shut this file.

We’ll take inspiration from Apache’s default virtual host file, 000-default.conf. To make a virtual host file for each of our domains, we’ll copy it across.

Copy the file for the first domain first:

Open the new file in your editor of choice (we’ll be using nano below) as root:

This file will be modified for use with our domain. Change the underlined text below to suit your needs.

Save the document now, then shut it.

Now that we’ve established our first virtual host file, we can make our second one by duplicating it and making the necessary adjustments.

To begin, copy it:

Open your editor and the new file with root privileges:

All of the information must now be changed to relate to your second domain. The completed document should like this, with the highlighted text being the information from your own pertinent site.

When you’re done, save and shut the file.

We now need to enable our virtual host files, which we established before. To accomplish this, we’ll use the a2ensite tool.

The default site specified in 000-default.conf should then be disabled:

After you’re done, restart Apache for the modifications to take effect, and run systemctl status to ensure the restart was successful.

You should now have two websites being served by your server.

If you haven’t been testing this process with real domain names that you own, but rather with some example domains, you can check your progress by momentarily changing the hosts file on your local computer.

Type the next on a local Mac or Linux computer:

You can find instructions on changing your hosts file for a local Windows PC here.

Your file should appear as follows using the domains mentioned in this article and your server IP in place of the text your_server_IP:

Save the document, then exit. Any requests made to example.com and test.com on our PC will now be sent to our server.