Creating virtual hosts on Apache in Linux Mint 17.3

Question

I am working Linux Mint 17.3, and trying to create virtual hosts on Apache 2.4. I have followed the following procedure, but I still can't browse the site.

1. Create two new virtual hosts.

   sudo cp /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf /etc/apache2/sites-available/site1.com.conf
   

2. Modify each host.

   sudo vim /etc/apache2/sites-available/site1.com.conf 
   
   <VirtualHost *:80>  
     ServerName site1.com  
     ServerAlias www.site1.com  
     ServerAdmin admin@site1.com  
     DocumentRoot /var/www/site1.com/public_html  
     ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log  
     CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined  
   </VirtualHost>  
   

3. Enable the new virtual host files.

   sudo a2ensite site1.com  
   // Disable original html host  
   sudo a2dissite 000-default.conf  
   sudo service apache2 reload 
   

4. Add host info.

   sudo vim /etc/hosts  
   
   127.0.0.1:88 site1.com  
   127.0.0.1:89 site2.com
   

I have checked out everything online that I could. I want to know what step I am missing here.

Answer 1

I would argue that your configuration should look something like this:

Listen 80
<VirtualHost *:80>
    DocumentRoot "/www/example1"
    ServerName www.example.com

    # Other directives here
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *:80>
    DocumentRoot "/www/example2"
    ServerName www.example.org

    # Other directives here
</VirtualHost>

Use 000-default.conf only, and forget about the other configuration until you get more comfortable with how this works. If you have an app server such as node or tomcat serving on specific ports, then you could configure the virtualhost port to be that app's port, but it looks like you are trying to serve static resources from /var/www/, so you don't even need multiple port mappings. Apache will just watch the request and route traffic to the right location for you. With this configuration, your host file becomes:

127.0.0.1:80 example.com 
127.0.0.1:80 example.org

edit: since you have posted what might be most of your conf file, it looks like you are missing a listen 80 directive at the top of the file?