Apache setup for multi-sites

Question

My dev machine(Ubuntu 11.04) has many rails app sites on apache2. One of the site config is like this.

<VirtualHost 192.168.1.7:80>
  DocumentRoot /home/ssk/dev/base3/sam/public
  ServerName base3.sam.codepremise.com
  RailsEnv development
  <directory /home/ssk/dev/base3/sam/public>
    Options FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride None
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
  </directory>
</VirtualHost>

There are many other sites like this on the same machine. I feel bad about having the IP fixed. So I changed one of the sites like the following.

<VirtualHost *:80>
  DocumentRoot /home/ssk/dev/base3/sam/public
  ServerName base3.sam.codepremise.com
  RailsEnv development
  <directory /home/ssk/dev/base3/sam/public>
    Options FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride None
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
  </directory>
</VirtualHost>

And I restarted apache. But the site doesn't work and instead some other site came up when I requested from the browser.

Why doesn't the wildcard work?

Answer 1

If you have multiple hosts set up to listen on the same IP and port, and you have only changed the configs for this one to *:80, then one of the others is probably taking precedence. It sounds like you are trying to use name-based virtual hosts (i.e., httpd serves different content for each ServerName, as requested by the browser), but you might be missing a line in your config:

NameVirtualHost *:80

Read the instructions for name-based virtual hosts, and if it sounds like what you want, then you probably just need to add that line, and change all the VirtualHosts to *:80.