Question

I have seen it before where, to stop the need to restart the Apache service when a new virtual host is added you can use regular expressions to setup a Virtual Host. I have a server where sites are added and removed fairly often, and would like to do so.

All directories for the sites are in the following format: /var/www/{domain-of-site}/www. So I need to to match the regular expression “var/www/([A-Za-z0-9.]){1,}/www” to get both the directory and the domain name.

Is this really possible in Apache2? If so what would a basic look like?

Answer 1

I do this on my dev machine. You need to enable mod_vhost_alias.
Then in your vhosts file, add:

VirtualDocumentroot "/var/www/%-1.0s/%-2.0/public_html"
<Directory "/var/www">
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride All
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Directory>

This will point http://mydevproject.client to /var/www/clients/mydevproject/public_html