Virtual Host Running on apache

History

I had Drupal configured and running on my machine, this was good. But understanding Drupal and going ahead with it became a trouble. so I wanted to go with plain PHP scripting, so next step was to create a new server for the new website.

Problem

I configured the apache2 for the additional virtual host using this Debian link. But my new URL was not working. When we restart apache2 or reload, we get warning on NameVirtualHost *:80.

$ sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload
* Reloading web server config apache2
[Sat Jul 27 00:27:37 2013] [warn] NameVirtualHost *:80 has no VirtualHosts

Solution : remove/comment #NameVirtualHost *:80 from /etc/apache2/ports.conf

Hint: grep for NameVirtualHost * and confirm that all the entries in the apache2 folder are similar.

And the virtual host configuration works fine as below but the URL is not working.

$ apache2ctl -S
VirtualHost configuration:
wildcard NameVirtualHosts and _default_ servers:
*:80                   is a NameVirtualHost
default server preetam-box (/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default:1)
port 80 namevhost preetam-box (/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default:1)
port 80 namevhost drupal722 (/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/drupal722:1)
port 80 namevhost preetamsite (/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/preetamsite:1)
Syntax OK
$ source /etc/apache2/envvars ; /usr/sbin/apache2 -S
VirtualHost configuration:
wildcard NameVirtualHosts and _default_ servers:
*:80                   is a NameVirtualHost
default server preetam-box (/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default:1)
port 80 namevhost preetam-box (/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default:1)
port 80 namevhost drupal722 (/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/drupal722:1)
port 80 namevhost preetamsite (/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/preetamsite:1)
Syntax OK

Now these are OK.

Solution

The problem is that the DNS is not getting resolved and to get this working we need to edit /etc/hosts and add our new website.

127.0.0.1   localhost
127.0.0.1   drupal722
127.0.0.1   preetamsite    # <== new entry here
127.0.1.1   ubuntu

this lets the DNS to route our URL to apache2

Conclusion

Have patience with Google and ask right questions. I wasted my 4 hours of time and found this. Was it worth it? it was :)