Accessing a development LAMP server as if it were the live server by faking the URL

Question

At the moment I have my test server set-up like so http://localhost/~callum but I want to set-up a fake url so I can link javascripts and CSS files from my PHP files. Hope this makes sense any help is much a appreciated. I should also say I am using a public_html folder and not var/www.

EDIT: What I mean by fake url is that I want to turn my url from http://localhost/~callum to something like this http://callumstestwebsite.com/ without owning the domain so that I can continue to develop on my new laptop, I used to use windows 7 so I am getting used to ubuntu.

Answer 1

To be able to access a local resource as if it were the main site you need to do two things:

1. Edit your hosts file such that your computer thinks that your domain name is served by localhost. Your hosts file should contain a line with 127.0.0.1 in it and your host name would need to be added to that line, something like: 127.0.0.1 localhost callumstestwebsite.com Use the command line sudo editor /etc/hosts to edit this file.

2. Configure your webserver to serve the website when a request is made for that host name. It appears that you are currently serving the site only when there is a path of /~callum but you would need to configure the webserver differently. Generally this would entail adding a virtualhost directive something like (for apache server in httpd.conf):

---

<VirtualHost *:80>
    DocumentRoot /home/callum/public_html
    ServerName callumstestwebsite.com
</VirtualHost>

In my Debian based distribution I would create a file called /etc/apache2/sites-available/callumstestwebsite with that contents (and any other needed configuration), then enable the site with the command: sudo a2ensite callumstestwebsite, then restart my webserver with sudo service apache2 restart