The ability to create and utilize tools, makes human race dominant in world. Tools make our work easier and also saves time. One of the tools, I am going to share is bash shell script to create apache2 server virtual host.
Why Virtual Host?
Using virtual host we can run more than one web site (such as dev.drupal-cms.com, stage.drupal-cms.com and www.drupal-cms.com) on a single machine. It can be "IP-based" or “name-based”. In IP-based you can have different IP address for each web site. In name-based you can have multiple names running on each IP address.
Shell script code
Explanation
Script expects 3 strings as input:
- Domain name: Name of domain you wish to give for the site. Eg: drupal-cms.local or stage.drupal-cms.com or drupal-cms
- Full path to webroot: Full path to site webroot. Eg: /var/www/html/drupal-cms
- Server admin (optional): Site server admin email id. This is optional, default value will be ‘webmaster@localhost’
Script does the following to create a virtual host for apache2:
- Creates virtual host rules files inside `/etc/apache2/sites-available/` (line number 12 to 24)
- Creates an IP address mapping in ‘/etc/hosts’ file. Mapping would be like this 127.0.0.1 $name (line number 26)
- Enables the site, a2ensite $name
- Restarts apache2 server, service apache2 reload
Usage
- Download or clone the script from https://github.com/manoj-apare/Virtual-Host-Script
- Make it executable.
- Run the command:
sudo [path-to-script]/virtual-host-script.sh [domain-name] [full-path-to-webroot] [optional-server-admin-email-id]
Note: third argument is optional.
That’s it. Now you can access the site using newly created virtual host by clicking the link printed by the script on CLI.
