As I mentioned before, we’ve set up an Ubuntu server with Apache, MySQL, and PHP, to run, amongst other things, a wiki (in our case DokuWiki). For some reason the main page was working fine, but any other pages were showing up as var_www_vhosts_wiki.medeco.com_whatever.

After some frustrating searches around the Web, I finally figured out what I did wrong. Here are the steps I took:

  1. Set up Virtual Hosts in Apache:
  2. Create the directory for your virtual domain under the vhosts directory
  3. Create a file in /etc/apache2/sites-available with the same name as your virtual domain, containing the following: 
     <VirtualHost wiki.medeco.com>
   ServerName wiki.medeco.com
   ServerAlias wiki
   DocumentRoot /var/www/vhosts/wiki.medeco.com/web
   ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/wiki-error.log
   CustomLog /var/log/apache2/wiki-access.log common
   RewriteLog /var/log/apache2/wiki-rewrite.log
   <Directory /var/www/vhosts/wiki.medeco.com/web>
     Options -Indexes +FollowSymLinks
     Order allow,deny
     Allow from all
     RewriteEngine on
     RewriteRule ^_media/(.*) lib/exe/fetch.php?media=$1 [QSA,L]
     RewriteRule ^_detail/(.*) lib/exe/detail.php?media=$1 [QSA,L]
     RewriteRule ^$ doku.php [L]
     RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
     RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
     RewriteRule (.*) doku.php?id=$1 [QSA,L]
   </Directory>
 </VirtualHost>
  4. Create a symbolic link in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled, pointing to your virtual domain config file in sites-available:
    ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/wiki.medeco.com /etc/apache2/sites-enables/001-wiki.medeco.com
  5. Touch your local DokuWiki config file:
    sudo touch /var/www/vhosts/wiki.medeco.com/web/conf/local.php
  6. Restart Apache by entering
    sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart