Setting Up Virtual Hosts

The usage of virtual hosts in Apache Configuration is the practice of running more than one web site (that targets local resources) on a single machine.

Virtual hosts are IP-based, meaning that you have a different IP address for every web site, or "name-based", meaning that you have multiple names running on each IP address. This practice using Apache2 on OpenSuse comes in handy when you want to simulate a production environment (however working in dev environment) locally accessing to your project by a normal URL in the browser.

To setup a custom virtual host, we need to follow these steps:

1. Check if virtual hosts are allowed

By default, Apache2 won't use the /etc/apache2/vhosts.d/*.conf files (the location of the virtual hosts), therefore we need to indicate that this file will be included during the runtime of Apache.

Once you have installed and checked the status of Apache, go to its Web-root directory and create a new directory as mentioned below.

 cd /srv/www/htdocs/

 sudo mkdir myproject

Create a new file in the above mentioned directory by using the following command.

 echo -e '<html>\n<html>\n\t<body>\n\t\t<h1>MyWiki Works!</h1>\n\t</body>\n</html>' > /srv/www/htdocs/myproject/index.html

Create a new virtualhost configuration file in the below mentioned directory and configure it as follows.

/etc/apache2/conf.d/vhost.conf

 echo -e 'DocumentRoot\"/srv/www/htdocs/site1\"\nServerName  www.linuxhelp1.com"\' > /etc/apache2/conf.d/vhost.conf

/etc/hosts
/etc/apache2/conf.d/vhost.conf

/opt/lampp/etc/httpd.conf

# Virtual hosts
#Include etc/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf

Proceed to modify the line uncommenting that line:

# Virtual hosts
Include etc/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf

2. Create a custom domain for the host files on your system

https://doc.opensuse.org/docum[...]nce/cha-apache2.html

https://doc.opensuse.org/documentation/leap/reference/html/book-reference/cha-apache2.html#sec-apache2-configuration-manually-configfiles-etc-apache2

2.1. Create folder to host your files

You need to create a custom domain where our apache virtual host will point to. This domain will be normally an ip (127.0.0.xx based) and a custom name.

In this example, our IP will be 127.0.0.3 and the domain myproject. So finally, our hosts file will look like:

/etc/hosts

127.0.0.1	localhost
127.0.0.3	myproject

#don't touch other existent values
# The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts
::1     ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
fe00::0 ip6-localnet
ff00::0 ip6-mcastprefix
ff02::1 ip6-allnodes
ff02::2 ip6-allrouters

2.2. Link DocumentRoot to ServerName respectively virtual host

/opt/lampp/etc/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf

<VirtualHost 127.0.0.3:80>
  DocumentRoot "/opt/lampp/htdocs/my-project"
  DirectoryIndex index.php

  <Directory "/opt/lampp/htdocs/my-project">
	Options All
	AllowOverride All
	Require all granted
  </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

2.3. Edit configuration file

Start apache and mysql (entire XAMPP).
Navigate in your browser to http://myproject/ or http://127.0.0.3/.