Archive for May 25th, 2010

Resolving Wildcard DNS subdomains in Virtual hosts in Apache webserver (WildCard Virtual Hosts)

Tuesday, May 25th, 2010

The company for which I’m employed as a free lancer, has a requirement to start-up a new website on a different Debian Linux powered server.
In connection to that they needed to change the DNS records to point to the new IP address of the server.
That was a piece of cake, all I had to do was, edit the domain name zone file and change the A (Active) record to point to another IP address
The trouble was that in this concrete scenario the website domain has previously had Wildcard DNS record enabled earlier on.
So domains like bla.exampledomain.com, asdf.exampledomain.com you-name-it.exampledomain.com was configured to resolve to the IP address determined for the exampledomain.com
Therefore it was necessery that Apache is configured to serve any incoming request on any *.exampledomain.com subdomain accessed.

Fortunately this is really easily achievable and is described in Apache Named-based Virtualhost documentation

In short all you need to make your Apache start serving all incoming requests to any subdomain is to edit your Virtualhost on Debian for the default subdomain that would mean to edit:

edit /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default

debian-server:~# vim /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default
# Therein you will have to add the following line

ServerAlias domainexample.com *.domainexample.com

That’s is all necessery, now restart the webserver as usual for the new configuration to take affect.

debian-server:~# /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Congrats, now all your subdomians for the domainexample.com like for instance:

http://bla.domainexample.com or http://somerandom-word.domainexample.com should open http://domainexample.com .