Linux 10.04 configure default site on webserver

Question

I am trying to figure out what determines the "default" website on a webserver.

I am running a Ubuntu 10.04 webserver that hosts 5 different websites.

In my apache2/sites-available folder there is an entry like this for each of the 5 sites:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName mysite.ca
ServerAlias www.mysite.ca
ServerAdmin daniel@mysite.ca
DocumentRoot /home/sites/Dropbox/mysite.ca/
  <Directory /home/sites/Dropbox/mysite.ca/>
        Options -Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
    AllowOverride All
    Order allow,deny
    allow from all
  </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

When I try to access this webserver via IP address from a computer that is behind the firewall and within Active Directory, the webpage for one of the sites loads, but I would prefer to load a different site. How can I control which site loads by default on my webserver?

Answer 1

It loads the first available VirtualHost which is simple the order they are placed in your configuration file. You can check the order by typing apache2ctl -S on the commandline of your server.

To change this, you can re-order the VirtualHost container, or simply create some sort of "default".

Answer 2

Usually on my installs I add a file named 00_Default_Site on the /etc/apache2/sites-available/ and add the Default Vhost config on it.

As soon as you don't add any other config file that could have precedence on a name sorting, it will always be the first config file to be included, and because that, the first to load and the one that will behave as default.