Create Virtual Hosts for Apache on CentOS

For each website (domain or subdomain) you need a Virtual Host, a file that contains information for Apache to find where the website’s files are on your server, how to access them, where to write the logs, etc.

While Ubuntu/Debian has a system to enable/disable Virtual Hosts, on CentOS you will need to do this manually if you want to keep things neat. You can always create the Virtual Hosts files in /etc/https/conf.d and skip the next steps. I prefer to mimic the Ubuntu/Debian solution.

First, create the directories where you will store the Virtual Hosts

sudo mkdir /etc/httpd/sites-available
sudo mkdir /etc/httpd/sites-enabled

Instruct Apache to load the configuration files from sites-enabled by editing the httpd.conf file

sudo vi /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

Add this line at the end of the file

IncludeOptional sites-enabled/*.conf

Let’s create a new configuration file for a test domain, my-test-domain.com

sudo vi /etc/httpd/sites-available/my-test-domain.com.conf

Here is the contents of the file (I will store the Website files in /usr/share/httpd/my-test-domain; change that to your directory) :

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName my-test-domain.com
    ServerAlias www.my-test-domain.com
    ServerAdmin admin@my-test-domain.com
    DocumentRoot /usr/share/httpd/my-test-domain
    
    <Directory "/usr/share/httpd/my-test-domain">
        DirectoryIndex index.php index.html
        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride All
        Require all granted
    </Directory>    
    
    ErrorLog /var/log/httpd/error.log
    CustomLog /var/log/httpd/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

Enable the Virtual Host by creating a symlink from sites-available to sites-enabled

sudo ln -s /etc/httpd/sites-available/my-test-domain.com.conf /etc/httpd/sites-enabled/my-test-domain.com.conf

Restart Apache to load the new configuration

sudo systemctl restart httpd