Setting up multisite on Debian 8 using virtual hosts

22 January 2016 Notes on how to set up multisite on Debian 8 by configuring virtual hosts.

This post is about:

Debian 8
Apache 2

Configure the first website of your multisite installation (assuming that your website's files are located at /var/www/example.com/htdocs):

1. Create a config file for your first website:

sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/example.com.conf

.conf part is important!

Alternatively you could copy default config file:

cp 000-default.conf example.com.conf

Add/modify the content of the file to be:

#
#  Example.com (/etc/apache2/sites-available/example.com.conf)
#
<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerAdmin admin@example.com
    ServerName example.com
    ServerAlias www.example.com *.example.com
    DocumentRoot /var/www/example.com/htdocs/
    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteOptions inherit

    # Logfiles
    ErrorLog  /var/www/example.com/logs/error.log
    CustomLog /var/www/example.com/logs/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

Save the file.

2. Activate the host:

sudo a2ensite example.com

3. Check the Apache config syntax to prevent it from crashing in case you made a mistake in configuration:

sudo apache2ctl configtest

4. If the status is OK, restart Apache:

sudo service apache2 restart

Create such a config file for every website in your multisite install.

*****