Question

This has probably been asked but I can’t find a straight answer, or the ones I found don’t work.

I have one domain mydomain.com, resolving to an IP; let’s call it 8.8.8.8. The DNS settings also point two subdomains to that IP address with an A record. These are dev.mydomain.com and staging.mydomain.com. Both have an A-record pointing to 8.8.8.8.

On the server (8.8.8.8) I have two virtual hosts files. These are as follows:

staging.mydomain.com.conf

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName  staging.mydomain.com
    DocumentRoot /var/www/html/mydomain.com/staging/
</VirtualHost>

And…

dev.mydomain.com.conf

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName  dev.mydomain.com
    DocumentRoot /var/www/html/mydomain.com/dev/
</VirtualHost>

The problem is:

Regardless of whether I visit http://staging.mydomain.com or http://dev.mydomain.com, I always land on staging.mydomain.com (Apache serves these files).

I have restarted Apache and even the server. If I change the order of the .conf files so that dev is first, I always see that. Any suggestions would be so appreciated. Thanks!

---

update

I find myself back at this problem again! If you know that your syntax is correct, you might have a bad symlink. Delete it and recreate again, restarting apache in-between. I just did this and it solved hours of head-scratching. On CentOS you can check your available vhosts with httpd -S

update 2

I’ve also found this issue to exist when the apache log files for the virtual host don’t exist, or aren’t writable.

Answer 1

Sounds like you need to add NameVirtualHost directive to your configuration.

NameVirtualHost         *:80

Under some circumstances Apache may not be able to handle *:80 VirtualHosts correctly. In those cases you should map VirtualHosts directly on specific IPs.

NameVirtualHost         8.8.8.8:80

<VirtualHost 8.8.8.8:80>
    ServerName  staging.mydomain.com
    ServerAlias stage.mydomain.com
    DocumentRoot /var/www/html/mydomain.com/staging/
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost 8.8.8.8:80>
    ServerName  dev.mydomain.com
    ServerAlias development.mydomain.com
    DocumentRoot /var/www/html/mydomain.com/dev/
</VirtualHost>

You can also run apachectl -t -D DUMP_VHOSTS to see how Apache parses the VirtualHost configuration.

Update: As mentioned in the comments, usually you can just use NameVirtualHost *:80. So most of the time you can configure the virtual hosts as follows.

NameVirtualHost         *:80

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName  staging.mydomain.com
    ServerAlias stage.mydomain.com
    DocumentRoot /var/www/html/mydomain.com/staging/
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName  dev.mydomain.com
    ServerAlias development.mydomain.com
    DocumentRoot /var/www/html/mydomain.com/dev/
</VirtualHost>