This is really basic, but driving me mad, I was hoping to route around and understand how this works.

How does a Domain get pointed to an application directory.

My DNS is set to point my domain to my ip address, however how does the url getd to the application directory on my server.

I have no idea how this works and I can find any information on this, I have tried searching within my Matrix panel to see if I can find any way of doing this but no luck.

It must be really basic, so please be blunt if i am being a numbty.

NeillH

Hi NeillH,

I'll first try to understand your question.

The DNS (domain name service) only manages the relation between the IP-adress and the name of a Computer.

Otherwise if you open an URL in a browser you are connected with a file (mostly any *.htm) in a directory on the computer.

Is that your question? who tells the browser where inside a computer is the file I want to open (very simply spoken)?

Well an URL has two parts, the first one is an alias which is (more or less) related to the IP-adress of the server, the rest is the directory on the computer. In fact there is not one computer for every website and there is not necessarily only one website hosted on one server.

You can try that out, replace the "http://.....org" part of an URL with the related IP-adress (which you can get if ping the site).

Markus

Hi Markus

You have understood my poorly worded question.

I can reach my web site by using my IP of my unix server and directory (77.xx.xx.xx/mydirectory). I will have more than one web site on this server so how do I reach this directory by domain name. There must be a configuration I am missing by pointing the domain to the correct ditectory, as there may be more than one application directory.

When I ping the site I get following

pining mywebsite.co.uk [77.xx.xx.xx] with 32 bytes of data then I get 4 time outs. So it does appear that the domain is resolving to my IP address, but I guess then it has no where to go when it hits my server.

I am getting less confued now, but not quite there yet.

Neillh

Your webserver (e.g. apache) is listening on port 80. When a html header is received, the webserver checks the html header (for the requested domain) and decides which pages (DocumentRoot) to serve. This is called 'name-based' and multiple domains can be on the same ip-address.

This does not work with https (webserver listening on port 443) as the request is encrypted and to decrypt it, it must know the key. To know the key, it must know the domain. So we have a chicken and egg problem. The solution is that each domain has it's own ip-address so apache can decide based on ip-address which pages to serve. Exception is subdomains with a wildcard certificate.

OK so if I have multiple web sites on my server I will need a different IP address for each site?

Having re read response I am not using an HTTPS adress so it looks like I dont need IP unique addresses per site. So the "name based" approach should be used. How can this be configure?

By reading the documentation?

Google: Apache Configuration

So I stopped being lazy and found some references to this, and all is working now but just need to clarify a few things.

I found reference to vitualhost setting in httpd.conf, so I checked my server and found no entries here in my httpd.conf.

However I did find a file called vhost.conf and this seems to be how the domain gets resolved to my application directory. Although not clear it seems that if I add a directory called the domain name then this will get resolved.


<VirtualHost 77.xx.xx.xx:80>
ServerName myservername.com
ServerAlias www.myserverdomain.com
ServerAdmin webmaster@myserverdomain.com
DocumentRoot /home/default/myserverdomain.com/user/htdocs
ErrorLog /home/default/myserverdomain.com/user/logfiles/error_log
TransferLog /home/default/myserverdomain.com/user/logfiles/access_log
php_admin_value open_basedir /tmp:/home/default/myserverdomain.com
SuexecUserGroup myuser matrixdomain
ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /home/default/myserverdomain.com/user/htdocs/cgi-bin/
AddHandler server-parsed .shtml
AddType text/html .shtml
<Location />
Options +Includes
</Location>
# Begin user directives <--
# --> End user directives
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost 77.xx.xx.xx:80>
ServerName echoecho.eu
ServerAlias www.echoecho.eu
"vhost.conf" 268L, 10059C

So is it that simple?, just create a directory, called mynewwebsite.com, in the root shown in vhost.conf, place my web application files in this new dir. Then all works OK when I point my domain to my server IP address?

Neillh - a lot less confussed.

Yep, it's basically that simple. Below my virtual host configuration as reference; note that I don't use server aliases and don't specify ip-addresses in the VirtualHost directive.