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I recently had a situation where I had some problems working with the navigation paths on my development system that was going into a different directory structure on my production machine. In this case, the development path was a few layers deep while the production path was at the DocumentRoot.

The way I resolved the issue was to apply a couple of things:

1. create a virtual host that pointed to the development path
2. update the /etc/hosts file to include names for the virtual host

Setting up your server for using virtual hosts

Most apache installations come out of the box ready to support virtual hosts. They just need to be configured.

If you are going to set up your apache server for virtual hosting, one thing to keep in mind is that you must use a virtual host for the default host; the information in the httpd.conf file for ServerName and DocumentRoot is ignored.

Set up vhosts subdirectory

If there isn't already, create a subdirectory to hold the various virtual host configuration files. This makes it easier to manage multiple virtual hosts without cluttering up the main httpd.conf file:

          mkdir /etc/apache2/vhosts

is one example of how to do this.

Modify the httpd.conf file

You will need to modify the httpd.conf file to use virtual hosts by adding the following lines:

         ## Virtual hosts
         NameVirtualHost *:80

         <VirtualHost *:80>
         ServerName localhost
         DocumentRoot "/Library/WebServer/Documents"
         </VirtualHost>

         Include /etc/apache2/vhosts/*.conf

The last line will include all file from the vhosts directory that end in .conf.

on OS X, the path to /etc is really /private/etc.

Create the configuration file for your new vhost:

         cd /etc/apache2/vhosts
         touch mysite.conf

Configure the mysite vhost:

         <VirtualHost *:80>
         ServerName mysite
         DocumentRoot "/path/to/mysite/files"
         </VirtualHost>

Make changes to /etc/hosts

In order for you to browse to the vhost to let your machine know where to find the vhost. Add the following line to /etc/hosts:

         127.0.0.1    mysite

Note that the separator between the IP address and the hostname is a tab character.

Restart the server and you should be good to go!

        apachectl restart

You can now access the virtual host via the URL: http://mysite/.