How to add a virtual host in Scotch Box

Sometimes you want to host multiple sites in a single virtual Scotch Box public_html folder, or any other Vagrant+VirtualBox setup.

Say you have a folder called drupal in public_html, you can always access the web site via http://192.168.33.10/drupal, but this is not optimal, for example for paths to images, if they rely on starting the path from root.

A possible solution is adding an extra Virtual Host to your Scotch Box.

Open your /etc/hosts file on your own machine (not Scotch Box) with

sudo vi /etc/hosts

... and add this

192.168.33.10 dev_site.local

This will make your browser ask Scotch Box, which is at 192.168.33.10, for dev_site.local.

On Scotch Box, open the default Virtual host file for Apache, 000-default.conf

sudo vi /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf

... assuming your site is in /var/www/public/dev_site, add this below the existing entry

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
  DocumentRoot /var/www/public/d7.local
  ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
  CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
  ServerName d7.local
        <Directory "/var/www/public/d7.local">
            Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
            AllowOverride all
            Require all granted
        </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

This tells Scotch to guide requests for dev_site.local to the folder /var/www/public/dev_site.

Restart the Apache server to make the update take effect.

sudo systemctl restart apache2.service

If you are using Drupal, add this to your settings.php file:

$base_url = 'http://dev_site.local';

clear cache and generate a one-time log-in link

drush cc all
drush uli

You should now be able to access your site at http://d7.local

To automate, you can copy paste this into your terminal:

sudo -i
echo "
<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
  DocumentRoot /var/www/public/d7.local
  ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
  CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
  ServerName d7.local
        <Directory "/var/www/public/d7.local">
            Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
            AllowOverride all
            Require all granted
        </Directory>
</VirtualHost>
" >> /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf
systemctl restart apache2.service
exit