setting up a vhost alias with a wildcard for domain and document root - doc root not parsed correctly

Question

I only have a fuzzy idea of the correct terminology to use in this question so please feel free to help me by clarifying it.

I have a vhost setup. The idea is that I want a wildcard to route all requests for root.TERM.lh to a /TERM/ document root.

The setup below recognises the domains fine and routes them accordingly, but it doesn't translate the %1 in the document root to TERM. For eg the Apache error log tells me that for a request to root.mywebsite.lh it's attempting to route to /Users/hollsk/Dev/websites/%1, so it's interpreting it as a literal string.

Is my syntax incorrect, or am I missing some module?

NameVirtualHost *
<VirtualHost *>
    ServerName root.%1.lh
    ServerAlias root.%1.lh
    DocumentRoot /Users/hollsk/Dev/websites/%1/
</VirtualHost>

Answer 1

This style of configuration requires using an add-on module, not the core virtual hosting directives.

See VirtualDocumentRoot here: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_vhost_alias.html

Answer 2

My syntax was subtly incorrect.

NameVirtualHost *
<VirtualHost *>
    ServerName root.%2.lh
    ServerAlias root.%2.lh
    DocumentRoot /Users/hollsk/Dev/websites/%2/
</VirtualHost>

Note the %2 instead of %1 - still not sure why %1 was being intepreted literally (instead of as the string root, which is what I'd expect), but changing to the correct handle fixed the problem in any case.