How to Setup Virtual Hosts with Apache Web Server on Linux?

Last Updated : 04 Jul, 2024

Setting up a virtual host in Apache web server on Linux allows us to host multiple websites on a single server. This virtual host is useful when one wants to host multiple projects for businesses managing multiple domains with a single server.

Prerequisites

Apache server installed.
Root or sudo access

Steps to set up virtual hosts with Apache web server

Step 1: Install Apache

If you have not installed Apache on your system then run the following with root privileges.

sudo apt update
sudo apt install apache2

Step 2: Create Directory for Each Website

Make a directory to house each domain's website files. We'll make directories for example.com and example.org in this case.

sudo mkdir -p /var/www/example.com/public_html
sudo mkdir -p /var/www/example.org/public_html

Set the correct permissions for these directories:

sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /var/www/example.com/public_html
sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /var/www/example.org/public_html
sudo chmod -R 755 /var/www

Step 3: Create Sample Pages for Each Website

Create a simple index.html file for each website to test the setup.

For example.com:

echo "
 <html>
  <body>
     <h1>Welcome to example.com!</h1>
  </body>
 </html>" > /var/www/example.com/public_html/index.html

For example.org:

echo "
 <html>
  <body>
     <h1>Welcome to example.org!</h1>
  </body>
 </html>" > /var/www/example.org/public_html/index.html

Step 4: Create Virtual Host Configuration Files

For every virtual host, create a different configuration file. For these configurations, Apache usually uses the sites-available directory.
For example.com:

sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/example.com.conf

Add the following configuration:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerAdmin [email protected]
    ServerName example.com
    ServerAlias www.example.com
    DocumentRoot /var/www/example.com/public_html
    ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/example.com_error.log
    CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/example.com_access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

For example.org:

sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/example.org.conf

Add the following configuration:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerAdmin [email protected]
    ServerName example.org
    ServerAlias www.example.org
    DocumentRoot /var/www/example.org/public_html
    ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/example.org_error.log
    CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/example.org_access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

Step 5: Enable the Virtual Hosts

Enabling the virtual host files and restarting the Apache

sudo a2ensite example.com.conf
sudo a2ensite example.org.conf
sudo systemctl restart apache2

Step 6: Test the Configuration

Edit your local /etc/hosts file to point the domain names to your server’s IP address for testing purposes.

sudo nano /etc/hosts

Add the following lines:

127.0.0.1   example.com
127.0.0.1   example.org

Save and close the file and open a web browser and navigate to http://example.com or http://example.org to verify that each site is correctly fetched.

Conclusion

Following the detailed steps in this article you can setup multiple virtual hosts on single Apache server in a Linux environment. This setup helps us host multiple websites with different domains improving the resource utilization and simplifying server management.