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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.

Jongosi
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    I have voted to re-open this question, because both the question and the answer are helpful. Besides this, questions about Apache are not off-topic on StackOverflow, and ServerFault is only for professional setups. – Sumurai8 Jun 17 '15 at 09:54

1 Answers1

33

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>
Ketola
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  • Thx Ketola. At the end of my httpd.conf file, I have the following (where the vhosts are included) `NameVirtualHost *:80 [[new line]] Include /etc/httpd/sites-enabled/` – Jongosi Dec 12 '12 at 11:32
  • That should work then. Apache can be a bit picky with `*:80` at times, so you might want to try `8.8.8.8:80` instead to see if it works better. Also run `apachectl -t -D DUMP_VHOSTS` to see how Apache parses your configuration files. Updated the answer to reflect these as well. – Ketola Dec 12 '12 at 11:45
  • Thanks Ketola, tried that in both .conf files and the httpd.conf file but no cigar, although the order changes! The `apachectl -t -D DUMP_VHOSTS` is very useful and shows that Apache is defining the dev server as the default and loading it first. – Jongosi Dec 12 '12 at 12:04
  • Very strange. The only other cause I can think of is a typo somewhere, but that's quite unlikely. Do you have a proxy or anything else in between that could mess up the `Host:` header in the request? The next step would be to set `LogLevel debug` in Apache, and/or do `telnet localhost 80` on the server and request for the document directly. – Ketola Dec 12 '12 at 12:51
  • Thx anyway Ketola. Going to look at the domain DNS settings again. – Jongosi Dec 12 '12 at 13:24
  • Thank you for accepting the answer Jongosi. I'm sure you'll figure out the problem soon enough. – Ketola Dec 12 '12 at 14:35
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    I had a similar issue...the `apachectl -t -D DUMP_VHOSTS` command was the tell all: `[Mon May 20 23:51:08 2013] [warn] _default_ VirtualHost overlap on port 80, the first has precedence `. Adding the `NameVirtualHost *:80` solved it – jyore May 21 '13 at 05:01
  • For googlerslike me use this: ServerName www.domain.tld ServerAlias domain.tld *.domain.tld DocumentRoot /www/domain – Alex Khimich Dec 28 '14 at 00:52
  • I tried NameVirtualHost, but it is being deprecated. And it didn't work for me anyway. – Bobort Jan 15 '21 at 15:55