Virtual Hosts on a Local Wamp Server

Well I was having a peculiar problem recently while working on a project. I wanted to use relative links (e.g.Home and it seemed that this was my only solution to a peculiar problem. However, as some of you may have realized when using relative links, the page is redirected to "localhost/index.php" instead of "localhost/mySite/index.php". Well I tried so many solutions, but I really wanted relative linking to work because it seems to be the best solution. Well the solution I discovered is Virtual Hosting.

As the name implies, virtual hosting means you can virtually host different sites. Instead of you being stuck with localhost preceding every site, you can easily work with a virtual host such as mySite.local/. Cool right? So how exactly can this be done? This solution allows you to host multiple virtual hosts on your wamp server.

After installing Wamp Server on your computer system, you can place all your sites in the www folder and preview them on a web page using localhost/mySite. But if you would like to have a local URL of your own, follow the following steps

Step 1: Edit the Windows hosts file (directory is C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts using your favorite text editor (I used Notepad). If you are using Windows Vista or 7, ensure that you open Notepad with administrator privilages, else you would not be able to save changes. To open with administrator privileges, search for your text editor (in this case notepad) from your start menu. Right click it and select Run as administrator. Add a line 127.0.0.1 your-local-domain. You can out any name in place of your-local-domain. Your file should look like this. Save and continue to step 2.

Step 2: Next, open the httpd.conf file found in C:\wamp\bin\apache\apache2.2.11\conf (note that the version number of apache may be different depending on your installation, i.e. 2.2.11). Scroll towards the bottom and look for the line that says  #Include conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf says remove the comment (i.e. # sign).

Step 3: Open the httpd-vhosts.conf file found in  C:\wamp\bin\apache\apache2.2.11\conf\extras using your text editor. Scroll to the bottom and include the following code lines shown below. The first module is needed to preserve the http://localhost while the second one is for each subdomain you would like to create. Note the line that says DocumentRoot. You should include the directory of your  subdomain. If you choose you file to be within C:\wamp\www\your-local-domain, then you can omit the whole <directory>

<virtualhost *:80>

ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost

DocumentRoot "c:/wamp/www"

ServerName localhost

ErrorLog "logs/localhost-error.log"

CustomLog "logs/localhost-access.log" common
</virtualhost>

<virtualhost *:80>

ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost

DocumentRoot "c:/Users/marf/Projects/your local folder/html"

ServerName your-local-domain

ErrorLog "logs/your_own-error.log"

CustomLog "logs/your_own-access.log" common

<directory "c:/Users/tobaniyi/Projects/your_local_folder/html"></directory>

Options Indexes FollowSymLinks

AllowOverride all

Order Deny,Allow

Deny from all

Allow from 127.0.0.1

</virtualhost>

Save all changes and restart the apache server. With these steps, you should have your sub-domain fully functional.