Setting up drupal multisite on localhost (with Apache Alias)

In this blog post I am going to explain about setting up drupal multisite with Apache Alias and it is a continuation of previous blog post where i explained about using single drupal installation to host more than one site with quiz module branches (quiz 3.x and quiz 4.x) as example.

There we created two sites one for each branches and the sites are accessible from the URL http://quiz3dev and http://quiz4dev

Well that is fine and works out of box. Thanks a ton to drupal. Imagine the case where you want to use the same domain name across the sites and wants to access like

http://mysite.com/site1
http://mysite.com/site2
..
http://mysite.com/siteN

The method described in the previous blog posts uses Apache VirtualHost concepts which requires about 10 lines of entries in Apache configuration file /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default for each site

Probably this is not the good, though it helps to achieve the thing we need. Apache alias is an another way to setup drupal multisite with domin name shared across the individual sites.

The procedure to set up is as follow.

1. Creating directory structure similar step 3 in previous blog post

2. Add lines to .htaccess

This should go between line # RewriteBase / and # Rewrite URLs of the form 'x' to the form 'index.php?q=x'.

Remember the above lines uses the name that comes after domain name http://localhost/quiz3dev/ and http://localhost/quiz4dev/ you need to replace quiz3dev and quiz4dev to suit your set up.

3. Add alias in Apache configuration file /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default

where /home/sivaji/Public/d6 is the path to root of drupal file system.

That's all we are done. Now the URL http://localhost/quiz3dev and http://localhost/quiz4dev will take you to quiz 3.x and quiz4.x site respectively.