n00b apache2 alias question

[idn]

Hi

I was wondering if someone could help me setup an alias on apache to a folder on my home directory.

The foler is at /home/idn/projects/portal/www

So when I go to http://localhost/portal it goes to the directory above. I will neeed to execture php scripts in this directory.

I have googled round but havent really found a clear howto so if soeone could post step by step instructions i would very much appreciate it

Thanks!

[jgoguen]

I'm assuming you already have PHP installed here?

Edit /etc/apache2/apache2.conf (orI think it's /etc/apache/httpd.conf if you're using Apache 1). Add this line:

Alias /portal /home/idn/projects/portal/www

Now restart Apache:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Or /etc/init.d/apache restart if you use Apache 1. Now, most important step. Open a web browser and go to http://hostname/portal (replace hostname with the hostname of your box, or localhost in your case it seems) and enjoy your pages.

[David Marrs]

or go to /var/www/ and set up a symbolic link to /home/idn/projects/portal/www.

ln -s /home/idn/projects/portal/www

[jgoguen]

But that creates the structure /var/www/www, meaning he would go to http://localhost/www instead of http://localhost/portal like he said he wanted.

[idn]

I'm assuming you already have PHP installed here?

Edit /etc/apache2/apache2.conf (orI think it's /etc/apache/httpd.conf if you're using Apache 1). Add this line:

Alias /portal /home/idn/projects/portal/www

Now restart Apache:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Or /etc/init.d/apache restart if you use Apache 1. Now, most important step. Open a web browser and go to http://hostname/portal (replace hostname with the hostname of your box, or localhost in your case it seems) and enjoy your pages.

Thanks this works great!

[gushil]

but why do if i added one slash in alias directive such as..

Alias /portal/ /home/idn/projects/portal/www

it become unusable?

if we access files on portal apache return file not found.
any clue? (however in default /doc/ is alias with two slash, and it worked flawlessly)

[achron]

Straight from the Apache 2 docs:

The Alias directive allows documents to be stored in the local filesystem other than under the DocumentRoot. URLs with a (%-decoded) path beginning with url-path will be mapped to local files beginning with directory-path. The url-path is case-sensitive, even on case-insensitive file systems.
Example:

Alias /image /ftp/pub/image

A request for http://myserver/image/foo.gif would cause the server to return the file /ftp/pub/image/foo.gif. Only complete path segments are matched, so the above alias would not match a request for http://myserver/imagefoo.gif. For more complex matching using regular expressions, see the AliasMatch directive.

Note that if you include a trailing / on the url-path then the server will require a trailing / in order to expand the alias. That is, if you use Alias /icons/ /usr/local/apache/icons/ then the url /icons will not be aliased.