Phing is an awesome tool for automating things and I use it more and more for automating all kinds of different tasks. One of the tasks that I don't tend to do all that much is setting up a new local virtual host for Apache on my development machines. I know how to do it, but there is always something I forget to do, or a convention that I don't follow which means that I have to repeat myself at a later date to fix something I have missed.

I recently built a Drupal site on an Apache server sertup and everything seemed fine until someone running IE8 tried to download a .docx file. For some reason IE8 insisted that this file was a .zip file and would open it as such, causing a bit of confusion as to what the problem was. I assumed that this was due to the mime type of the file not being set properly, but I decided to do a quick search to see if I could find anything to corroborate this. I thought it might be something odd that IE8 was doing as everything else was downloading the file perfectly.

Use the following rules in your Apache configuration (or your .htaccess file) to redirect all traffic from one domain to another. This also keeps the query string in place so that the user isn't just dumped to the homepage.

I was recently setting up a localhost environment with Ubuntu 11 and after adding all of my needed VirtualVost directives I found that I could start/restart the server but that I found the following error when trying to start the server.

Following on from the post about starting and stopping MySQL using .bat files I decided to add commands to these files that also controlled Apache in the same way. This turned out to be a lot easier than trying to start and stop MySQL as the command line commands for httpd executable worked very well in .bat files.

So, to start Apache use the following line.

Apache can be set up to log all sorts of information. As of Apache 2.2 the basic log file format that a fresh install of Apache will produce will have the following format:

Which doesn't mean a lot to the uninitiated, so here is a short explanation of each.