Serve a subdirectory out of a parallel server side directory

Question

I have an apache server running with two folders in a subdirectory (/var/www/html/example), a virtual host config in httpd.conf serves URLs from /var/www/html/example/website and /var/html/example/service

I'd like the /var/html/example/service folder to be the root when navigating to example.com/services/ and I'd like /var/www/html/example/website to be the root when accessed via example.com/

From my httpd.conf file this is what I added (unsurprisingly it doesn't work but for clarities sake):

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName www.example.com
ServerAlias example.com/services
DocumentRoot /var/www/html/example/service
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName www.example.com
ServerAlias mysite.com www.example.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/html/example/website
</VirtualHost>

Is this possible to achieve? I was thinking of using redirects or changing virtualhost to do it if that's even possible. I'm mostly worried about the website conflicting with the services.

The website will be a WordPress site if that affects anything.

Answer 1

You need to use the Alias directive from mod_alias. It is designed to serve documents for a path from a different server side directory:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName www.example.com
    ServerAlias example.com
    DocumentRoot /var/www/html/example/website
    Alias "/services" "/var/www/html/example/service"
</VirtualHost>

A few notes on what you had tried:

• You can only have one virtual host configuration per domain. Your attempt to create two virtual hosts for your single site wasn't going to work.
• ServerAlias is only for domain names. Putting a path into that isn't going to work.