How can I serve multiple websites from specific paths on Apache? - linux

Question

I have two projects - site_a and site_b - that I would like to host on an Ubuntu server running Apache. I want these two projects to be accessed at paths {domain}/site_a and {domain}/site_b, respectively; I am not interested in having separate domains for them.
With the exception of each project's public/ directory, each project contains files that I do not want to be publicly accessible. So, I have stored the projects in /home instead of in /var/www.
I have tried specifying ServerName in both projects' .conf files and <Directory> in apache2.conf, but am unsure on how to make this work. At the moment, whenever I access {domain}/ in a browser, I get shown the contents of site_a/public.
Here is what I tried so far:
site_a.conf:
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin webmaster#localhost
ServerName localhost/site_a
DocumentRoot /home/site_a/public
ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>
site_b.conf:
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin webmaster#localhost
ServerName localhost/site_b
DocumentRoot /home/site_b/public
ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>
apache2.conf:
<Directory /home/site_a>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
Require all granted
</Directory>
<Directory /home/site_b>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
Require all granted
</Directory>

Answer 1

Since you want both sites to respond on the same domain, you can only have 1 VirtualHost. Apache has no way to know what is site A and site B based on the domain if you only have 1.
One domain, 2 sites
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName example.com
ServerAlias www.example.com
ServerAdmin admin#example.com
documentRoot "YOUR_DIRECTORY_PATH/apache/htdocs"
DirectoryIndex index.html
ErrorLog "logs/80_error_log"
CustomLog "logs/80_access_log" combined
</VirtualHost>
Setup your files like this:
under YOUR_DIRECTORY_PATH/apache/htdocs
mkdir site_a: put your files for site a here
mkdir site_b: put your files for site b here
One domain, 2 ports
<VirtualHost *:80>
SITE A CONFIG
</VirtualHost>
<VirtulaHost *:81>
SITE B CONFIG
</VirtualHost>
To see site a: http://example.com/
To see site b: http://example.com:81/