RE: Some questions about configuration Apache from a beginer. [EXT] (Apache Users)

The first one doesn’t matter – but to be honest you shouldn’t do it – you should create two configurations – one for the www.domain and one for domain. Choose one as canonical (the one you really want users to see) and put the real configuration here.

Under the other domain – you include a rewrite rule to redirect to the canonical one…

<VirtualHost *:443>

ServerName mydomain.com

ServerAlias myotherdomain.com

ServerAlias www. myotherdomain.com

Include conf/ssl-conf/mydomain.com.conf

RewriteEngine on

RewriteRule (.*) https://www.mydomain.com/ $1 [R,L,NE]

</VirtualHost>

Now which use as the canonical domain is up to you….

There are arguments for both – there is trend to remove the WWW, but if you have multiple domains on the same server (we have around 120 at work for a front end proxy) – you can set the www.domain1.com, www.domain2.com, www.domain3.com to be CNAMEs in DNS so if you have to quickly move to another IP address you can just update the A record for the hostname the CNAMEs point to (for example if the primary machine fell over and you couldn’t get it back up and running)… If you use the unqualified domain domain1.com, domain2.com etc you would have to change each A record separately.

Now - there are three real reasons for using ServerAlias in my mind:

Having a common code base across a different number of sites – which uses the URL of the request to determine a configuration – and consequently run different versions of the site….
You have multiple aliases for a domain so you can use ServerAlias to redirect them to the canonical domain (see above)
You have live, staging, dev and sandbox servers as part of the production cycle, so you set the ServerName to the URL of the live server and the staging/dev/sandbox URLs as ServerAlias – then you can use the same configuration on each of the servers {with a little bit of environment variable fudging to set root paths for the apache}

ServerName www.mydomain.com

ServerAlias dev.mydomain.com

ServerAlias test.mydomain.com

ServerAlias my-sandbox-server.mydomain.com

ServerAlias freds-sandbox-server.mydomain.com

Include conf/ssl-conf/mydomain.com.conf

… configuration …
</VirtualHost>

From: Jason Long <hack3rcon@xxxxxxxxx.INVALID>
Sent: 03 September 2020 22:43
To: users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [users@httpd] Some questions about configuration Apache from a beginer. [EXT]

Hello,

I have some questions about Apache configuration and I'm thankful if anyone help me.

1- In Apache configuration, both of "ServerName" and "ServerAlias" must be defined? Which one must have "www" prefix?

2- If "/etc/pki/tls/private/localhost.key" and

"/etc/ssl/certs/localhost.crt" files deleted then how can I regenerate them? Is below command OK?

# openssl req -x509 -nodes -days 365 -newkey rsa:2048 -keyout /etc/pki/tls/private/localhost.key -out /etc/ssl/certs/localhost.crt

The "localhost" is the name of my host? If my hostname is "example-test" then these files name must be "example-test.key" and "example-test.crt" ?

3- By default, Linux use "localhost.localdomain" if I installed Apache and my web site is up too then can I change "localhost.localdomain" ?

4- For a web site with the name "example-test.net" and "192.168.1.2" IP address, what is the content of "/etc/hostname" and "/etc/hosts" files?

It is a great help if anyone answer my questions by number.

Thank you.