The issue is not with rewrite. To make a local page appear to have a more conventional domain you need to tell your browser that the conventional domain is found on your local webserver.
The simplest way to do this is by editing the hosts file on your OS. On *nix based devices it's usually /etc/hosts
, On windows it's usually C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts
. You will need elevated privileges to edit the file.
Add a line to the end of the file that maps the domain name to your local ip address like this:
127.0.0.1 www.site.com
Close an reopen your browser and visit www.site.com
, you should see it is loading the page from your local webserver.
Chances are, you are still seeing the same page as if you view localhost site. To make it load your code you need to change the DocumentRoot
in httpd.conf for your apache install to match the directory where your code is.
A preferable solution may be to use Name Based Virtual Hosting, this allows multiple web sites to share the same IP address. Searching 'apache VirtualHost examples' should give you plenty of resources for this. Make sure that NameVirtualHost *:80
is also enabled in order for this to work.