Hosting multiple domains in Apache2 - how? - wordpress

Question

Although I’ve found related articles on stackoverflow, I have seen various suggestions which I’ve tried out but I still experience problems, so that’s the reason why I’m posting this.
I have a question which involves DNS, Debian, Apache2 and Wordpress. I’ve been struggling with this for some time now and haven’t been able to solve it. My current conclusion is that 2there is something with my dns and apache virtual host definitions”, but, as I said I’m far from sure.
This is what my config looks like:
two domains which I “own” hosted by moniker.com - let’s call them domaina and domainb
a hosted vps with Debian, apache2 and wordpress. The vps has ip x.y.z.t
each domain has three ‘A’ records defined: ‘*’, ‘#’ and ‘www’
URL rewrite enabled (a2enmod rewrite)
Wordpress installed and links created to the wordpress directory for both document directories specified in the virtualhost directives below
Both ‘domaina’ and ‘domainb’ point to my vps and this is working ok. However, what I’ve been unable to solve is to have the vps handle “multiple virtual hosts”. I thought I would be able to handle this by using virtual hosts in Apache. For that purpose I’ve defined two sites under /etc/apache2/sites-available which looks like this:
(file: /etc/apache2/sites-available/domaina.com)
<VirtualHost x.y.z.t:80>
ServerName domaina.com
ServerAdmin me#domaina.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/domaina.com
DirectoryIndex index.php
<Directory /var/www/domaina.com/>
AllowOverride all
Order deny,allow
Allow from all
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>
(file: /etc/apache2/sites-available/domainb.com)
<VirtualHost x.y.z.t:80>
ServerName domainb.com
ServerAdmin me#domainab.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/domainb.com
DirectoryIndex index.php
<Directory /var/www/domainb.com/>
AllowOverride all
Order deny,allow
Allow from all
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>
Now, when I try to address the sites above from a web-browser I end up at the default apache directory with the index.html file rendered in the browser instead of arriving at the two different wordpress configurations. Obviously there’s something wrong with my thinking around “VirtualHosts” and/or DNS-configurations…
I forgot to mention that I've made loads of /etc/unit.d/apache2 restarts... Sorry...
Frankly speaking I’m lost here and any help on this would be very much appreciated.
Cheers

Answer 1

If you did restart apache and its still not working please respond, as I have experienced similar issues with Apache, especially when getting the virtual host to work. I realise your running on Debian which is different to WAMP, but this is what I do when opening a new virtual host.
First I add the domain to the windows system 32 drivers etc hosts file, it allows for intranet
127.0.0.1 domainname and this stops the url from looking to the web.
Then I have to add the corret directories to the www/your folder.
Just inside the root folder there ought to be a directory called vhosts,
I had to make totaly empty instances of the conf files with just the filename of the virtual hosts inside it so that the changes you made to the httpd-vhosts.conf works.
So what you will need to do is find the wamp/bin/apache/Apache2.2.21/conf/extra/httpd-vhosts makes sure that you have the one from the conf/axtra and not conf/orginal.
<VirtualHost *:80>
DocumentRoot "c:/wamp/www/**name of the folder**"
ServerName **as_inserted_in_hosts**
<directory "c:/wamp/www//**name of the folder**">
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride all
Order Deny,Allow
Deny from all
Allow from 127.0.0.1
</directory>
</VirtualHost>
Save. Apache stop all services, I also have to restart the service running the intranet in windows to update the changes to the hosts file and then restart apache.
This is what I have to do so that when I open localhost from Apache it allows me to see the links appear under virtual hosts as well as the directories appearing under your projects.
Have a look at this tutorial... Explains how to set up virtual hosts

Answer 2

Do you have a NameVirtualHost directive in your apache2.conf anywhere? You'll need that to enable virtual hosting. It can go in apache2.conf or any file included by apache2.conf. On my server I've got it in ports.conf.
NameVirtualHost *:80
See http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/vhosts/name-based.html#using