CFMX Multi Instance Apache config - made simple

If the title makes sense then the rest of the article will be a breeze.

For some the hardest part of Apache is the fact that there is no GUI (Graphical User Interface) for the configuration. To me it's the reason I love apache! While it might be a bit daunting if you are new to Apache the power and flexibility that the text file configuration gives you is simply not feasible in an GUI.

At RedBalloon we have a number of different sites and a number of different servers so being able to manage the config files and lay them out to suit our needs it a huge boost. On top of this, we version our config files using subversion which gives us backups, rollback and a version history.

The windows installer sets up a basic and very well commented config which is a great base to start from. We typically add the following line at the end to allow simple loading of the virtual host config files:

Each vhost file consists of a number of related virtual host sections:

We deliberately add listen directives at the top of the vhost file to easy migration of sites from one machine to another. All settings for a particular site are in one spot.

The sites in any one file are all related - i.e. for redballoon we have the main consumer site, our suppliers extranet site etc all in the one config.

The inner sections of the virtual host looks as follows:

By moving all of the common/repeated lines out to well named include files the vhost section is very simple to read and understand. It also makes it easy to add an alias across common sites or change the cfinstance the website is using.

Each of the include files is just the lines that would be directly in the file pulled out to an external file.

Eg - the cfinstance/example1-instance

Gotchas

SSL certificates

Wildcard sites - *.example.com

Conclusion