Override Mass Virtual Hosting for One VirtualHost

Question

I'm not sure if that question was properly worded.

Basically, I have it set up via http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/vhosts/mass.html so that I only have to create a folder (such as example.test) in my ~/Sites folder and I can go to http://example.test (granted my hosts file matches).

I am working on a couple projects that have a framework installed at one level above the public directory, so I was wondering if I could override the mass vhost for a single vhost.

I tried the following:

# I want this...
NameVirtualHost *:80

<VirtualHost *:80>
    DocumentRoot /Users/cameron/Sites/laravel.test/public
    ServerName laravel.test
</VirtualHost>

# ...to override this only for laravel.test
UseCanonicalName Off
VirtualDocumentRoot /Users/cameron/Sites/%0

The Laravel PHP framework installs the framework in level above the public like I was talking about, so when I go to http://laravel.test, I want it to go to /Users/cameron/Sites/laravel.test/public instead of /Users/cameron/Sites/laravel.test/ if that makes sense...

But the above code doesn't work. It basically ignores anything before the last two lines.

So my question is... is there a way to achieve what I want? Not necessarily the approach I'm trying, but I have a ton of local sites and 99% of them work great under the mass virtual host approach, I just occasionally want to override that behavior.

Answer 1

The documentation for VirtualDocumentRoot says to use none to turn it off, so I assume what you need to do is add that to your <VirtualHost> section:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    DocumentRoot /Users/cameron/Sites/laravel.test/public
    VirtualDocumentRoot none
    ServerName laravel.test
</VirtualHost>

This isn't enough, though: when using NameVirtualHost, if an incoming request does not match the ServerName/ServerAlias of any <VirtualHost> block, then the first <VirtualHost> block is used, no matter what name it had. In this case, it causes all of the other hostnames to this VirtualHost directive too.

A possible way to fix this would be to move the VirtualDocumentRoot directive into a <VirtualHost> block placed in the configuration before any other sites. The ServerName of this block shouldn't matter, something like:

<VirtualHost *:80>
     ServerName bogusname
     UseCanonicalName Off
     VirtualDocumentRoot /Users/cameron/Sites/%0
</VirtualHost>

The bogus name should ensure that this VirtualHost will only be used in the "default" case of no other VirtualHosts matching the request.