I do a lot of development on Ubuntu, as I often have multiple projects on the go which are nothing to do with each other, it’s often easier to create separate virtual hosts on my local development machine. This means that when they are ready for the “real world”, they are already set up as isolated sites at the root of their domain (rather than in a subdirectory of an existing site).
In order to do this, you need to create a new virtual host in your Apache config. Create a new file in the directory /etc/apache2/sites-available and open it in your favourite editor. It doesn’t matter what the file is called, but it’s best to keep it descriptive. We’ll call this project “mysite”, so the file can be called “mysite”. In the file we need to configure the Apache virtual host.
<VirtualHost 127.0.0.1> ServerName mysite.localhost DocumentRoot /var/www/mysite/public/ </VirtualHost>
In the VirtualHost tag, you put the IP, seeing as I only want this for local loopback (for development) I have just put 127.0.0.1. The ServerName is the URL that you use to connect to the site and the DocumentRoot is where the public documents are stored. This is a very basic set up, so there are many more options you can add.
To make the site enabled, you create a symbolic link to the file from the sites-enabled directory.
cd /etc/apache2/sites-enabled ln -s ../sites-available/mysite mysite
You now need to add the subdomain (mysite.localhost) to the list of hosts, so open /etc/hosts in your favourite editor and append the line:
127.0.0.1 mysite.localhost
And then restart Apache:
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
Now you should be able to visit http://mysite.localhost on the local machine (assuming the directory does actually exist).
This should also be similar on MacOS and other linux Distros, but the file locations (particularly for Apache) will vary.