Wildcard DNS combined with Single Subdomain DNS

Question

I am trying to have all subdomains point to one location on disk, and a particular subdomain (dev) point to another.

I tried this :

<VirtualHost cueflash.com>
 ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
 ServerAlias www.cueflash.com *.cueflash.com
 DocumentRoot /home/cueflash/www/cueflash.com
 CustomLog /var/log/apache2/cueflash.com.log combined
 ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/cueflash.com.error.log
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost dev.cueflash.com>
 ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
 ServerAlias dev.cueflash.com
 DocumentRoot /home/cueflash/www/dev.cueflash.com
 CustomLog /var/log/apache2/cueflash.com.dev.log combined
 ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/cueflash.com.error.dev.log
</VirtualHost>

But both seem to point to the main site.

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 28 '09 at 08:11

3

Wildcard "capture" happens on a first-come, first-served basis in Apache. Try swapping the order of those vhosts around, so that the dev site is first in the list.

answered Nov 28 '09 at 08:11

womble

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RobKohr · Accepted Answer · 2010-01-14T17:21:56.447

Ok, figured out how to do it. Basically, you do all of the non-wildcard hosts first, and then do the wildcard seperately since it follows a first precedence order (the first successful match is the one that is used).

<VirtualHost *>
 ServerName cueflash.com
 ServerAlias www.cueflash.com cueflash.com
 ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
 DocumentRoot /home/cueflash/www/cueflash.com
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *>
 ServerName dev.cueflash.com
 ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
 DocumentRoot /home/cueflash/www/dev.cueflash.com
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *>
 ServerName *.cueflash.com
 ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
 DocumentRoot /home/cueflash/www/cueflash.com
</VirtualHost>

You could set

<VirtualHost *>

to

<VirtualHost *:80>

depending on your listener. Also, not that I didn't include various settings for things like error logs. You will need them on each of your VirtualHost listings

Wildcard hostnames (`*.example.com`) are only possible with the `ServerAlias` but not with the `ServerName` directive. You've also written cueflash.com in `ServerName` and `ServerAlias` which is basically invalid (but works anyway). — joschi, Jan 13 '10 at 17:12

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Nov 29 '09 at 04:00

I'm a little confused. It looks like both hostnames you've used above (dev.cueflash.com and cueflash.com) resolve to the same IP address, which suggests you're trying to use name based virtual hosting...but neither of your VirtualHost blocks includes a ServerName directive (and the arguments to the VirtualHost block are arguably incorrect for named based virtual hosting). I'm not sure what the behavior of ServerAlias is without a corresponding ServerName.

You will also need to verify that you have an appopriate NameVirtualHost directive in your configuration. As specified in the documentation, if you are using name-based virtual hosts, the argument to the opening container should match exactly the argument to the NameVirtualHost directive. For example:

  NameVirtualHost *:80

  <VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName cueflash.com
    ...
  </VirtualHost>

Maybe you want to take a look at the documentation regarding name-based virtual host support for Apache.

For hostnames that don't explicitly match a ServerName or ServerAlias directive, you get the "default virtual host", which is "whichever virtual host Apache finds first in your configuration". I suspect this, in combination with your other problems, is why everything is hitting the main site.

Wildcard DNS combined with Single Subdomain DNS

3 Answers3