Harry Bailey

Two hours of my life were wasted on this one, even though I’ve done it before. So…

If you want to move your ~/Sites folder into say Dropbox or AeroFS or Google Drive or SkyDrive and then you still want to point to it from its default location don’t use an alias.

I know an alias is only a ctrl-click away, but it means all sorts of pain.

Instead, move the folder. Open Terminal and type:

ln -s ~/Dropbox/Sites ~/Sites

Replace Dropbox with whatever the folder of your service is called.

Restart Apache either by restarting Web Sharing in System Preference -> Sharing or by using Terminal and typing:

apachectl graceful

Cross your fingers and open a virtual host in your web browser. I fought with an Alias and all sorts of folder settings and httpd.conf lines to try and get it working, and then all I needed was to use a SymLink in its place.

Cheers to James Galley, my desk neighbour for helping my brain to click on this one.

If you’re a web developer and you can only get the first Virtual Host to work in your new Apache 2 local setup, it’s very simple to resolve.

Thanks to Alex King for the solution to fix Apache 2 only serving the first virtual host.

Basically the NameVirtualHost must match the value you use in your virtual host declaration, be it *, 1.2.3.4 or example.local

NameVirtualHost *
<VirtualHost *>
</VirtualHost>

You get the gist.