Question

I work at a web shop where we do a lot of WordPress sites, but over the past couple of years, I’ve been developing some rails applications, learning the ways of local development and whatnot. The sheer convenience of changing into a directory and running rails server has left me wanting for a similar solution for my Apache / PHP development workflow. Does anyone know of a solution to quickly and easily launch an Apache (or nginx, or lighttpd) / PHP server from the working directory, or am I stuck configuring something myself to watch a certain directory? I’ve used MAMP in the past but it’s not quite what I’m looking for. I’ve also looked into Vagrant, but it seems to be more trouble than it’s worth.

Sorry if I’m not making sense here, I don’t even know if it’s technically feasible, just wondering if anyone is looking for something similar.

Answer 1

There are a few solutions:

1. You could edit your httpd.conf (or apache.conf) file and add a VirtualHost (example below) and then restart apache. (This is your best option because it is using Apache (something designed as a server) to host your site without having to run a command over and over and over again)
2. You can use ScriptAlias or ScriptAliasMatch in the conf file too. This does not convert a directory, but it can let you do a more verbose redirect.
3. Simlink your directory into wherever your site is supposed to load. To me this seems sloppy and less than ideal.
4. use the built in webserver. The benefit is that this is as close as you can get to running a command and having an instant server, the detriment is that this really should only be used for development and it does not entirely map to Apache’s abilities.

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Virtual host example (be sure to add 127.0.0.1 myserver.local to /etc/hosts):

 <VirtualHost *:80>
    DocumentRoot "/path/you/like"
    ServerName myserver.local
    # This should be omitted in the production environment
    SetEnv APPLICATION_ENV development
    <Directory "/path/you/like">
        Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride All 
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all 
    </Directory>
 </VirtualHost>