I have Mac OS X Server. (on 10.8.3)
This problem is related to managing the webserver via the server software.
I appear to be starting the wrong apache, or at least the wrong httpd.conf file...
apachectl -V | grep SERVER_CONFIG
-D SERVER_CONFIG_FILE="/private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf"
Specifically I want to be able to control the virtual hosts, from the mac osx server application, rather than editing the httpd.conf file manually.
Anyone have any ideas?
/private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf is the correct 'master' config file for the Apache web-server when using Server.app
To have multiple virtual hosts on a single Mac server you either have multiple IP addresses defined and then define a website for each IP address, or have multiple host names point to the same single IP address (the more common scenario).
When a remote user accesses a URL with a host the webserver is able to detect which hostname they are requesting and then return the correct webpage. So if you have a list of websites like the following -
www.domain1.com
www.anotherdomain2.com
www.yetanother3.org
You can have them all in a DNS server pointing to the same single IP address of your webserver. In Server.app you define three websites on per host, and specify what folder full of webpages to use for each.
No need to mess about hand editing any conf files.
Starting the wrong apache server.
