Ubuntu – Disable public access to the apache2 server

If you're setting up just a development machine you don't need outside url's to lead into your machine as you should be developing in such a way that the url doesn't matter. I have multiple projects going at the same time and all of them work fine with no internet connection. This is how I setup my platform.

localhost does not need to have internet to work.

Open your hosts file and add your sites to your development machine.

sudo nano /etc/hosts

For each site you're going to build, add a host record for it like below.

Now in your apache virtual host files you can set them up accordingly.

As an example here is the config file for my elim.localhost site. Which I store as /etc/apache2/sites-available/elim.localhost.conf

after adding this information to the file I issue this command:

sudo a2ensite elim.localhost.conf && sudo service apache2 reload

Now in the browser, access my site I can type:

elim.localhost

I repeat this process for each project. Based on the setup at the time of this post the following urls can be used on my development machine, all going different places.

• elim.localhost
• 18we.localhost
• 29pines.localhost

If you're using phpmyadmin for your work on a mysql database server, localhost/phpmyadmin should still work with no problems.

This is confirmed to work even with the network card disconnected from the network.

A symlink should work fine. You may or may not need to add the directory to /etc/apache2/apache2.conf so that apache knows it is allowed to access the non-standard directory.

Example (note: I do not use the -d option):

doug@s15:/var/www/html$ ln -s /media/newhd/test_web bla2
doug@s15:/var/www/html$ ls -l
total 44
...
lrwxrwxrwx 1 doug doug   21 May 11 22:14 bla2 -> /media/newhd/test_web
...

Excerpt from '/etc/apache2/acpahe2.conf'

<Directory /var/www/>
        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride None
        Require all granted
</Directory>

<Directory /media/newhd/test_web/>
        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride None
        Require all granted
</Directory>

Make sure all permissions, including parents, are in order. You can do it manually, directory by directory or:

$ namei -m /media/newhd/test_web
f: /media/newhd/test_web
 drwxr-xr-x /
 drwsrwsrwt media
 drwxr-xr-x newhd
 drwxr-xr-x test_web

Now, there are some files systems that do not work with Apache, my example was an ext4 filesystem. And some disks that are automounted (mine is not) need an fstab entry to work properly.

Otherwise help us to help you with a little more information, such as any /var/log/apache2/*.log entries.