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Apr 28 2014
Apr 28

When I got my first VPS (from Linode) like 4 years ago, for heavy Drupal use, I read a lot of guides about setting up a LAMP stack on Ubuntu. At first most of those guides I read and followed were Drupal specific but later on I read a lot of non-drupal, LAMP stack related stuff as well.

In addition to the guides I read (and still reading), now I have 4 years of experience and knowledge that I learned by trial & error. Not to mention that I have a long System Admin (Windows only) and Database Admin (mostly Oracle) past. I still wouldn’t call myself a full-blown Linux System Admin but I believe I have come quite a long way since then.

Now I am thinking about the guides and wondering why none of the ones I read does not tell people to delete the default site configuration that comes enabled upon Apache installation. As if this is not enough, almost all of them relies on making changes on that default site config (Drupal or not).

99 times out of 100, you do not want/need a default site running on your server; which will service to any request that finds your server via IP or DNS; unless the request belongs to a website that you specifically configured. And I am sure you don’t want your apache to service a request, let’s say, http://imap.example.com unless you specifically configured a site for imap.example.com.

One of the first things I do is to delete that default website.
I can either delete the symlink…

cd /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/
rm 000-default.conf
service apache2 reload

or you can do it by disabling the site with “a2dissite” command. Some might say that this is the proper way to do it but actually they do the same thing; removes the symlink.

a2dissite 000-default.conf
service apache2 reload

As you have noticed that I did not actually delete the default site configuration file which resides in “/etc/apache2/sites-available/” I have only disabled that site. Who knows, I might need that file in the future (for reference purposes most likely).

Now the question pops in mind; the guides you follow tells you to make a change in that default site config file. Of course the changes will not have any effect since the default site is disabled. As for Drupal, it will ask you to change “AllowOverride None” to “AllowOverride All” in the below shown block.

        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride All
        Require all granted

This is how you do it. Open your “apache2.conf” file, where your real defaults are set. Find the same block and make the same change there.

cd /etc/apache2/
vi apache2.conf
##  Make the changes  ##
service apache2 reload

This is on Ubuntu 14.04 …

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