Dave Shea on setting up Virtual Hosts:
Virtual hosts enable you to intelligently run multiple sites on a single server. The useful side effect is that with proper setup, you can point your browser to www.whatever.whatever and load a local copy. My development site is now www.mezzoblue.dev, which works exactly the same as the .com, just faster. I don’t even need a connection to work on it, because it’s all local; all my PHP scripts and Movable Type templates work, and the local filesystem access is so much nicer than using FTP.
I’ve long been aware of their use, but never committed to learning how to set up virtual hosts in Apache. A conversation with Narayan of Etherfarm on his recent trip through Vancouver enlightened, and it’s really ridiculously easy, to the point where I wish I’d done this last year.
It’s just like kludging about with the Microsoft Loopback Adapter and hacking around with your HOSTS file…only a couple of orders of magnitude easier.
Nnnngggg. The time I’ve wasted….