This tutorial will show you how you can easily set up new virtual hosts on the stock Mac Apache install, perfect for testing and developing small PHP projects. Once you have done this, new projects can be set up by just creating new directories — no adding hosts to /etc/hosts or adding new Apache configuration will be required.

We are going to use ~/Sites/ as the base directory, and we’ll be able to dynamically serve from any directories under this. The name of the directory that you use will form part of the URL that you will use.

So, for example, if you created the following under ~/Sites/

mkdir -p ~/Sites/siteone/htdocs
mkdir -p ~/Sites/sitetwo/htdocs
mkdir -p ~/Sites/anothersite/htdocs

Then you will be able to access content from htdocs under the following URL’s

• http://siteone.localhost/
• http://sitetwo.localhost/
• http://anothersite.localhost/

Notice how we are using the .localhost TLD for this. RFC 2606 specifies that .localhost is reserved for local testing purposes.

So, how do we get to this setup? There are two parts:

1. Set up .localhost proxying

First of all, we need to make sure that any requests to a .localhost domain are routed to the local loopback device. For this, we will use the Automatic Proxy Configuration facilities of OS X.

We need to create the following Proxy Configuration File:

function FindProxyForURL(url, host)
{
	if (dnsDomainIs(host, ".localhost")) {
		return "PROXY localhost";
	}
 
	return "DIRECT";
}

Save the file as localhost.pac and place it in your ~/Sites/ directory.

Now, open up your System Preferences and go into Network. Select your network in the left hand pane, and click the ‘Advanced…’ button on right. Click the ‘Proxies’ tab and check ‘Automatic Proxy Configuration’. In the ‘Proxy Configuration File’, enter the URL to your file, for example http://localhost/~username/localhost.pac.

Click on ‘OK’ and then ‘Apply’.

2. Set up Apache VirtualHost

Edit the Apache configuration file for your user which is stored under /etc/apache2/users/.conf, and add the following:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    VirtualDocumentRoot "/Users/<username>/Sites/%1/htdocs"
    ServerName subdomains.localhost
    ServerAlias *.localhost
</VirtualHost>

Restart Apache with sudo apachectl restart

3. Test!

mkdir -p ~/Sites/mysite/htdocs
echo 'Hello World!' > ~/Sites/mysite/htdocs/index.html

Visit http://mysite.localhost/ in your browser, and you should see “Hello World!”

References

• Navigator Proxy Auto-Config File Format
• RFC 2606
• VirtualDocumentRoot Directive

Glen Scott

I’m a freelance software developer with 18 years’ professional experience in web development. I specialise in creating tailor-made, web-based systems that can help your business run like clockwork. I am the Managing Director of Yellow Square Development.

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