Virtual Hosting on OS X

Headdress looks like a nice little app for configuring virtual hosting on the local installation of Apache that comes with OS X. If you like doing things via a GUI, it’s probably right up your alley.

I don’t, and luckily, this sort of thing is really not that hard at all to do on your own with your good friend, the text editor. You’ll just need to edit two files, restart Apache, and then you’re done.

Map a domain to your local machine

First, you’ll need to tell your computer what domains should point to the local web server. I generally use ‘.dev’ to distinguish these from the real, live domains. mikewest.org is hosted on my machine locally as mikewest.dev, lddebate.org is lddebate.dev, etc.

Generally speaking, names like mikewest.org are resolved by asking a DNS server which IP address to request. We’re going to bypass that system for our local development domains by explicitly mapping each to our machine.

The easiest way to do this is to pop open /etc/hosts and add in a line mapping the domain to the loopback IP address: 127.0.0.1.

If you’re using TextMate, then from the terminal, you can type:

mate /etc/hosts

to open the hosts file for editing. You’ll see some mappings already in there, please don’t touch them. Instead, add a line at the end of the file for each domain you plan to host locally in the following format:

127.0.0.1        domainname.dev

Type the names and addresses in, one per line. When you’re finished, it should look something like:

127.0.0.1       mikewest.dev
127.0.0.1       lddebate.dev
127.0.0.1       supersecretproject.dev
127.0.0.1       iamsocool.dev

Your machine looks at this file to resolve a domain before it looks anywhere else, so this mapping takes precedence on your local machine.

It’s important to note, however, that this has absolutely no effect whatsoever on anyone else’s system. Telling your best friend about your test site at iamsocool.dev isn’t helpful at all, as she’s simply not going to be able to see it from her machine.

You’ll almost certainly have to restart your web browser in order to clear it’s cache, and you might even have to flush the system’s DNS cache by typing the following into terminal:

lookupd -flushcache

Tell Apache what to do with the domain

Now you’ve gotten your development domain set up to point to your machine, but Apache doesn’t know anything about it; We’ll need to set up some virtual hosts by editing the Apache configuration.

Pop open the httpd.conf file by typing the following at the terminal:

mate /etc/httpd/httpd.conf

Search for the string “NameVirtualHost” (on my install, it was on line 1063), and uncomment it by removing the leading octothorpe #. It should look like this when you’re done:

NameVirtualHost *:80

This explains to Apache that you’re going to be hosting multiple domains on your computer, and that it needs to use the name of each domain to distinguish which directory to serve files from. Now, we need to tell it which names to expect. For each of your domains, add in a virtual host definition that looks like this:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    DocumentRoot    /path/to/your/project
    ServerName        projectname.dev
</VirtualHost>

The DocumentRoot is the directory in which your project lives. The ServerName is the name that Apache should respond to. I lay out my projects as subdirectories of /Users/mwest/Projects/, so my configuration looks like:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    DocumentRoot    /Users/mwest/Projects/org_mikewest
    ServerName        mikewest.dev
</VirtualHost>

...

<VirtualHost *:80>
    DocumentRoot    /Users/mwest/Projects/org_lddebate
    ServerName        lddebate.dev
</VirtualHost>

Once you’ve added in all the virtual host definitions that you need, save the configuration file, then hop back into Terminal to restart Apache by typing:

sudo apachectl restart

It should pop right back up, and you’ll be ready to go!

Additional Resources

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