Topic: DocumentRoot and localhost vs 127.0.0.1 (Sorry, it's long)

[RogerH]

I have searched and fiddled and restarted far too many times, and have decided to come and hopefully get my problem resolved with help from those more knowledgable.

First, a quick overview of my setup. I have installed Apache 2.2.x, PHP 4.3.x, and MySQL on my local Windows 7 machine. Everything works, and have been using it for a few weeks now. I am currently have 3 sites I am working on:

mysite: main website that is currenlty online

mysitedev: revamping our main website, and don't want to mix it with what is live

mysite2: small side project site

I started with just mysitedev in the htdoc folder, it uses a shopping cart tied is to the domain name, so to test it locally I have to edit the .hosts file to actually preview it, but all worked fine.

I recently needed to do some minor updating to our current site, but didn't want to do live testing of it, so I created a second folder (mysite) for our current site, and renamed the development site folder to mysitedev. Since both the use the same shopping cart, both require access through www.domain.com. At first I attempted using a virtual host, thinking maybe I could do domain.com for one and www.domain.com for the other, but no luck. It may be possible, but was having general issues with my configuration that wouldn't let Apache start so decided to skip it. Any suggestions on this are welcome, but not too worried about it.

I then moved on to changing DocumentRoot (and the <Directory...> section to the appropriate folder. At first I directed it to my side site folder (site2) and going to localhost in a browser brought it up fine.

Trying out my main site (mysite) and using www.domain.com (redirected to 127.0.0.1 through .hosts file) would bring up a "No index found" error or something similar. Looking in my error log I found out it was serving from htdoc, which was no longer there. Creating an htdocs folder and putting a dummy index.php file in there caused www.mydomain.com to pull up the index file in htdocs instead of mysite like it should according to the DocumentRoot setting.

After a while of searching and changing and generally acomplishing nothing, I somehow tried going straight to localhost in my browser and lo and behold it worked! Well, not really, as the shopping cart software just threw an error - domain not authorized, but it did prove that 127.0.0.1 is serving htdocs while localhost is serving mysite.

TL;DR -
Windows 7 with Apache 2.2, PHP 4.3, and MySQL 5.
Changed DocumentRoot to mysite folder
127.0.0.1 serves htdocs folder anyway (www.domain.com redirected through .hosts file)
localhost servers correct (mysite) folder

Looking for a resolution as I have 2 versions of mysite that I am working on and they require domain name validation. I am currently using the htdocs folder and using mklink to link to the appropriate folder, but it's a pain.

Thanks!

[James Blond]

if you can than run the vhost ip based. So in your hosts file on can define the IP to the dev system and the external users will see the other page because of the external DNS server.