Virtual Host on a sub directory

Question

I m working on a web project and there a requirement that it works good on top domain, and on a domain+directory paths like this:

www.myDomain.com
www.myDomain.com/somedir/myproject/

The project deals with well with include files,

But i fail to setup my VHosts to test the second case www.myDomain.com/somedir/myproject/

My current setup is as simple as possible:

hosts

127.0.0.1       www.myDomain.com

httpd-vhosts.conf

NameVirtualHost *:80
<Directory C:/Projects>
  Order Deny,Allow
  Allow from all
</Directory>

<VirtualHost *:80>
  DocumentRoot C:\wamp\www
  ServerName localhost
</VirtualHost>   

<VirtualHost *:80>
    DocumentRoot "C:\Projects\MyProject\public_html"
    ServerName  "www.myDomain.com"
</VirtualHost>

#@ToDo make this work ...
#<VirtualHost *:80>
#    DocumentRoot "C:\Projects\MyProject\public_html"
#    ServerName  "www.myDomain.com/somedir/myproject/"
#</VirtualHost>

.htaccess

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -s [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -l [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule ^.*$ - [NC,L]
RewriteRule !\.(js|ico|gif|jpg|png|css)$ index.php [NC,L]

Can i do this just with Virtual host ? What is the best practice to achieve this setup on local machine?

Answer 1

What you need is an alias, not vhost. Virtualhosts work with hostnames, not hostname + directory.

<VirtualHost *:80>
  DocumentRoot "C:\Projects\MyProject\public_html"
  ServerName  "www.myDomain.com"

  Alias /somedir/myproject  "C:\Projects\MyProject\public_html"
</VirtualHost>

Edit:

The OP's problem appears to be somewhat different, and his solution is to send everything that is not an actual physical file to index.php, using a RewriteRule in the .htaccess file. This works, but putting them in your httpd.conf (or one if it's included files) is more efficient.

There is one way you can easily move working RewriteRules from .htaccess to httpd.conf without having to change them: Use a containers.

So if you have a .htaccess in for example /var/www/myproject you can move to httpd.conf like this.

<Directory /var/www/myproject>
    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -s [OR]
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -l [OR]
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
    RewriteRule ^.*$ - [NC,L]
    RewriteRule !\.(js|ico|gif|jpg|png|css)$ index.php [NC,L]
</directory>

The advantage over putting the rules in .htaccess files is that a .htaccess file gets read for every request. So it's better not to have any at all. You can move the RewriteRule outside of its directory context (to avoid having a internal redirect on each match) But then you would have to modify the pattern, as in a server context it's the whole URL you're matching against, not just the part after the directory.