Adding a virtual host on mac

Quickly adding a virtual host on mac (10.6) assuming your adding the host name "test".

1. Add your host name to your hosts file
• Open a terminal and type: sudo nano /etc/hosts
• Add "127.0.0.1 test" to the bottom of your hosts file, without the quotes.
2. Enable apache vhosts file
• open your httpd.conf 
• in a terminal type: cd /private/etc/apache2
• then: sudo nano httpd.conf 
• find the line #Include /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf
• remove the # at the beginning of the line (if it has one, if not, your good to go)
3. Add the folder you want the host to reference to the httpd-vhost.conf file
   • back in the terminal: cd extra
   • then: sudo nano httpd-vhosts.conf 
   • add the following to the bottom of the file, changing the DocumentRoot, directory paths and log file names appropriately.

   • <VirtualHost *:80>
         ServerAdmin webmaster@dummy-host2.example.com
         DocumentRoot "/User/patrickc/www/test"
         ServerName test
         ErrorLog "/private/var/log/apache2/test-error.log"
         CustomLog "/private/var/log/apache2/test-access.log" common
         <directory "/User/patrickc/www/test/">
            Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
            AllowOverride All
            Order allow,deny
            Allow from all
         </directory>
     </VirtualHost>
         

4. Restart apache
   • in your terminal; sudo apachectl restart (on some setups it might be; sudo apache restart)
5. Then open a browser and type http://test
6. That should be it, if you get a permissions error check the value in  <directory  />