In this screencast I walk you through how to set up virtual hosts on your local development server, specifically Wampserver on Windows.
As promised in the screencast I am appending a written version of the process on this post for your reference.
Setting Up Virtual Hosts on Wampserver in Windows
First create a new folder for your website under wamp/www and then create a test index.php file in there. Navigate to it in your browser to make sure that it works. Now we want to set things up so that we don’t have to type http://localhost/mylocalsite every time we want to view our site. Instead we can just type http://mylocalsite and it works.
There are two steps to this, the first is on the Windows end of things and the other is on the webserver end of things. On the Windows end we need to edit the hosts file to include our virtual domains. To do this, navigate (in Windows Vista) to Windows->System32->drivers->etc, and open the hosts file for editing. In Vista, and perhaps also in Windows 7 (I haven’t tried it on Windows 7 yet) you have to first give the current user the permissions to edit this file or you’ll be going around in circles trying to save your changes. Make sure you’re logged in as admin. Right click on the file and choose Properties. Then go to the security tab and edit the security settings to allow the current user permissions to edit the file.
OK, now that that’s done, we want to go ahead and add a line to the hosts file assigning the localhost IP to our virtual domain name, something like this:
127.0.0.1 mylocalsite
You can add as many domains as you want here using the same syntax.
This can really be anything you want it to be. Best choice is to not add .com or any extension that exists in the real web world out there because you may not be able to access that outside website when you need to.
Next step is to now work on the webserver side by editing the httpd.conf file in Apache. To do this, click on the wampserver icon, then Apache, and then click on the httpd.conf file which should open in Notepad. You can also navigate to this file directly by accessing wamp->bin->Apache->Apache2.2.11->conf. The Apache2.2.11 may be named differently for you depending on the version of Apache.
In some tutorials you’ll see that they tell you to add some code to the end of this httpd.conf file, but ideally you don’t want to do that. There is a neater better way to do this by using an include file that’s already present. First find the line that refers to the vhosts include file. Fastest way is to search for for the text “vhosts” in the httpd.conf file. Find the lines:
# Virtual hosts
#Include conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf
Uncomment the second line by removing the # sign so it reads:
# Virtual hosts
Include conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf
The next thing to do is to open the httpd-vhosts.conf so we can edit it. This will be in wamp->bin->apache->Apache2.2.11->conf->extra. Open the httpd-vhosts.conf file in your favorite code editor, or even in notepad. You will see some sample code there for configuring your virtual hosts. Edit that sample code (the one in the <VirtualHosts> brackets to your configuration. In my case, since I want to point to my drupal6 domain as I referenced it in hosts, I will edit the code to read:
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin admin@localhost
DocumentRoot "C:/wamp/www/"
ServerName localhost
ServerAlias www.localhost
ErrorLog "logs/localhost-error.log"
CustomLog "logs/localhost-access.log" common
</VirtualHost>
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin admin@mylocalsite
DocumentRoot "C:/wamp/www/mylocalsite/"
ServerName mylocalsite
ServerAlias www.mylocalsite
ErrorLog "logs/mylocalsite-error.log"
CustomLog "logs/mylocalsite-access.log" common
</VirtualHost>
Save the file and close it, and then make sure to restart Apache.
You should now be able to navigate to your local site directly by typing http://mylocalsite in your browser. In my case I navigate to http://mylocalsite and it should work.
I hope this helps you out when developing your own sites locally.
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I’m a bit confused on this concept. Does this mean It will be easier to build a site locally by using and testing with the correct links? Does the .com, .net etc get added on later? Sorry I’m a biit of a V server noob atm
Well, if you think about a regular hosting environment where you have more than one site, each site sits in it’s own folder, but when you load the site you don’t see the folder path from the server, just the domain name. This is basically what we’re replicating when we set up virtual hosts. This becomes particularly important with relative links, and when you’re working with frameworks such as Zend or CI which set routes to access the different controllers and views etc. It’s generally good practice to create virtual hosts especially if you plan to migrate the site to a live shared server. Hope this makes a little more sense.
hii
is very diifrent to do that in ubuntu ??
cus i ve been wantin to do it a while ago
tnx
i mean is it diffrent to dit in ubuntu
i ve been wantin to do it for a while ago but idk how
tnx
kosaidpo
To be honest I’ve never done this in Ubuntu since I work primarily from a Windows machine. The concept is the same though, you edit the hosts file and then create your hosts. Here are some links to give you a better idea of doing it on Ubuntu:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ApacheMySQLPHP#Virtual Hosts
http://www.daryl.mu/2008/01/20/howto-set-up-apache-virtual-hosts-on-ubuntu-gutsy-gibbon/
Hope this helps!
tnx a lot : )
Hi Mary
I use Fedora 11 on a PC, followed your and the Apache instructions in linux httpd.conf and for /etc/hosts and run into problems.
Can access the new virtual host with the directives as per the apache site.
But where 127.0.0.1 used to put me straight into Drupal site setup but now I get Drupal message “Site is off line” .
Got me puzzled.
Roger
Make sure that you’ve also created a virtual host for localhost.
mary
Hi Mary, I wonder how I can publish a site from my local server to its final place on the www.
(on it’s own domene and with the right databases)
Or is it just that plain simple to use ftp and publish the whole file from the wamp/www into its own domene?
Trudie
http://svn.modxcms.com/docs/display/MODx096/Moving+Site
Hope that helps!
mary
Super helpful…
I’m using MAMP with Snow Leopard and have been trying to get some advanced virtual host stuff setup for a few weeks now (Rails+Passenger+MAMP). There’s so much documentation on this, but your screencast is clear and easy to follow…
Haven’t tried setting things up yet (maybe tomorrow), but I have a feeling things will go much smoother after watching this cast… thanks!
Emerson,
Thanks for the feedback! Hope that your setup goes smoothly.
mary
Mary, thanks to your tutorials I found on youtube I’ve managed to set up local hosting and develop a site using wordpress. Thank you for putting this online to help people out.
I can view the site when I type http://mysite
into my browser but how can I let the person I’m building it for see how the site is progressing.
Do you have knowledge of how to let someone remotely view your localhost site. I’ve searched everywhere for this answer and some say change firewall settings etc; but i’d thought i would ask you first.
Thanks again
Derek
I have personally never done this so I don’t have a definitive guide. There’s some information here that might point you in the right direction – http://www.wampserver.com/phorum/read.php?2,58952,58957
Good luck
mary
Mary, great site! Tons of useful information. Working in Win 7 and having troubles with my virtualhosts working. Here are the subs from my httpd-vhosts.conf and hosts file
hosts:
# 127.0.0.1 localhost
# ::1 localhost
# 127.0.0.1 mysite
vhosts:
ServerAdmin admin@localhost
DocumentRoot “C:/wamp/www/”
ServerName localhost
ServerAlias http://www.localhost
ErrorLog “logs/localhost-error.log”
CustomLog “logs/localhost-access.log” common
ServerAdmin admin@mylocalsite
DocumentRoot “C:/wamp/www/mysite/”
ServerName mysite
ErrorLog “logs/mysite-error.log”
CustomLog “logs/mysite-access.log” common
Any reason you can see why they won’t work? They work fine from the \\localhost\mysite method
Thanks in advance for any pearls of wisdom
Mike
Excellent tutorial … you hit on areas that other descriptions fudge over (eg. proper use of the included ‘extra’ file) and also how to set it up so that the virtual site is a subfolder of the regular site.
Hi Mary,
Thank you for the clear and easy to follow screen cast’s on YouTube!
I have about 20 WordPress installs set up locally in WAMP. Setting up (logical) virtual hosts for each will now be simple thanks to you.
Do you have any advice on how to also do this with sub domains (locally)?
I’d like to set up a local WordPress Network using Multisite in WAMP.
So I’d create a new folder in WAMP named myexamplesite – this would be the main website for the Multisite Network.
Then I would like to create two more sites within the WordPress Network/Multisite set up. At this point, these would be created from within WordPress itself.
Those two names would be:
subsite1.myexamplesite
subsite2.myexamplesite
I would grateful for any advice that would extend on what you’ve already taught by adding sub domains to virtual hosts.
Thanks!
Actually, I guess a better question would be:
How can we set up a wildcard domain for any specific virtual host previously set up?
Thanks again!
Alex
Take a look at http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/vhosts/examples.html
mary