Dealing with development subdomains

Question

I have a virtualhost that is forwarding to my main domain (e.g. showing the same content that my main domain shows).

---

Right now my site uses a main domain: www.example.com

And various alias domains: example.com short.com

I'm creating a new walled garden development site: dev.example.com

But my virtualhost isn't being recognized for that url.

Do I have to create a wildcard record for *.example.com in my DNS host or something?

Here is the pertinent section from my default virtualhost settings (currently in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default ):

<VirtualHost *:80>
   ServerAdmin [email protected]
    ServerName www.example.com
    ServerAlias example.com
    ServerAlias shortUrlEx.com
    ServerAlias www.shortUrlEx.com

    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com [NC]
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com$1 [L,R=301]

    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^shortUrlEx.com [NC]
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com$1 [L,R=301]

    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.shortUrlEx.com [NC]
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com$1 [L,R=301]

    DocumentRoot /var/www/examplepath
    php_value date.timezone "America/New_York"
    php_value expose_php "Off"
    php_value upload_max_filesize 10M
    php_value post_max_size 10M

... other config options

And dev.example.com is configured as follows (from /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/dev.example.com):

<VirtualHost *>
<Directory />
    AuthType Basic
    AuthName "Check Site"
    AuthUserFile /srv/dev-example/config/.htpasswd
    Require valid-user
</Directory>

    ServerName dev.example.com


    DocumentRoot /srv/dev-example/public_html/
    Alias /favicon.ico /srv/dev-example/docs/dev_favicon.ico
    php_value date.timezone "America/New_York"


    php_value expose_php "Off"
    php_value upload_max_filesize 10M
    php_value post_max_size 10M
    <Directory />
        Options FollowSymLinks -Indexes
        AllowOverride None
    </Directory>
    <Directory /srv/dev-example>
        Options FollowSymLinks MultiViews -Indexes
        AllowOverride All
        Order allow,deny
        allow from all
    </Directory>

    ... further options that shouldn't be applicable...

What am I doing wrong here? How should I configure the default and dev.example.com virtualhosts to allow access to the dev subdomain and use the main domain for everything else?

Answer 1

What happens when you attempt to ping "dev.example.com"? Does it resolve to an IP address at all? If so, is it the IP address of the Apache server?

In this case, I suspect you will need to configure a new "dev.example.com" record in DNS (or at least in /etc/hosts) so that your workstation knows where that DNS is supposed to go.

Answer 2

Try updating your dev site's Virtualhost entry to: <VirtualHost *:80>

Note the addition of the :80.

Your virtual host definitions should match the NameVirtualHost setting's value. Running apachectl configtest usually reports any mismatchs.

Answer 3

I had to:

Change the virtualhost setting to be:

<VirtualHost *:80>

Uncomment the NameVirtualHost setting:

NameVirtualHost *:80

And add a ServerAlias to the dev.shermanbrothers.com virtualhost.

ServerAlias dev.shermanbrothers.com

Answer 4

Shouldn't /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/dev.shermanbrothers.com be /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/dev.shermanbrothers.com.conf? I think Apache takes *.conf files, at least it does in CentOS. Or have you included it manually?