Aslam Doctor

Create Apache Virtual host in Ubuntu 18.04

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So this is something everyone struggles with while installing the LAMP stack on Ubuntu 18.04. I struggle too and I decided to note down the proper steps so we all can easily follow them in the future.

Before You follow the steps, just make sure to change example.com with your specific domain. And one more thing, these steps are tested locally. For publishing the live domain, there are different steps that I will post in the future after proper testing.

So here are the steps.

Step 1

Create project directory

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

Step 2

Add an HTML file in it for testing

ShellScript
sudo nano /var/www/example.com/public_html/index.html

And add the below code in it

HTML
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en" dir="ltr">
  <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <title>Welcome to example.com</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>Success! example.com home page!</h1>
  </body>
</html>

Step 3

Add project directory to Apache www-data group.

ShellScript
sudo chown -R www-data: /var/www/example.com

Step 4

Create an apache config file for the project

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

And add the below code in it

Apache
<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName example.com
    ServerAlias www.example.com
    ServerAdmin webmaster@example.com
    DocumentRoot /var/www/example.com/public_html
    <Directory /var/www/example.com/public_html>
        Options -Indexes +FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride All
    </Directory>
    ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/example.com-error.log
    CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/example.com-access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

Step 5

Enable new project as apache site. This creates some configuration files for apache automatically.

ShellScript
sudo a2ensite example.com

Step 6

Create a symlink of the project from sites-available folder to sites-enabled folder.

ShellScript
sudo ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/example.com.conf /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/

* Note: If this command does not work, just ignore it. Everything will be fine.

Step 7

Check if all configurations are done properly.

ShellScript
sudo apachectl configtest

It should show “Status OK”

Step 8

Restart Apache server

ShellScript
sudo systemctl restart apache2

Step 9

Edit hosts file to access the site using domain name locally

ShellScript
sudo nano /etc/hosts

And add the below code in it

Plaintext
127.0.0.1 example.com

Step 10

Add full access permission to the project folder so you can add/update/delete files and folders without using root.

ShellScript
sudo chmod -R 777 /var/www

And finally, try running http://example.com URL in the browser. It should show the example page we created in Step 2.

If you find this helpful, please share it with others and leave comments.

Thank You.