Getting More Out Of Apache (Part 1) - Two Birds With One Host (
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Here's what the final
product looks like:
# host setting for melonfire-alpha.com
<VirtualHost 127.0.0.1>
ServerAdmin webmaster@melonfire-alpha.com
DocumentRoot /www/melonfire-alpha.com
ServerName melonfire-alpha.com
ErrorLog logs/melonfire-alpha.com-error_log
CustomLog logs/melonfire-alpha.com-access_log common
</VirtualHost>
# host setting for melonfire-beta.com
<VirtualHost 127.0.0.1>
ServerAdmin webmaster@melonfire-beta.com
DocumentRoot /www/melonfire-beta.com
ServerName melonfire-beta.com
ErrorLog logs/melonfire-beta.com-error_log
CustomLog logs/melonfire-beta.com-access_log common
</VirtualHost>
And you can test it by restarting the Apache server and pointing your
browser to the Web sites
http://melonfire-alpha.com and
http://melonfire-beta.com (note that you
may need to update your DNS tables as well for this to work).
On the
assumption that you have created HTML files for each host and stored them in the
locations you've specified for the DocumentRoot directive, Apache should display
the appropriate index page for each server. And if you take a look at the log
files, you should see separate log files for each virtual host.
As you
might imagine, the ability to host multiple Web sites on a single server is an
elegant - and economical - solution to the problem of limited IP address range
in the IPv4 protocol. It also allows Web hosting services to "sub-host" multiple
client domains on a single server, and developers to run multiple Web sites on
their development and test systems for simulation purposes.
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