Making local Drupal installation accessible through Virtual Host

Question

I am trying to introduce a staging step in my company's code-production process. We currently have ~10 eng clients who commit code individually, update local codebase - debug/check locally, then we deploy the code to production environment and have other employees QA. Obviously we would like to have a better pre-production test process to help catch bugs before they go live to the public.

My first attempt is to create a staging environment on an extra ubuntu box with the most recent committed code from the eng clients. I then could allow the Product Managers to check this site and find bugs, test features, expose bottlenecks, etc.

What I have: The ubuntu machine (local server) is currently configured as a normal eng client. It has a local drupal installation, complete backup of the db, and all of this is accessible locally. Let's go with mysite.com = official site; and the local staging domain I use on the ubuntu box = ms.com. This local ms.com works just fine, so in essence, I need to just allow other people at the company to navigate to some URL and it acts the exact way ms.com currently behaves. I have DNS servers pointing to the ubuntu box and it is running some side projects out of the /www folder.

In an effort to keep the side projects running, I think my solution is to create a name-based virtual host that points to the directory of the local drupal installation. Is this the right thing to do to achieve my goals? Is there an easier way to open up this local config to the employees.

In trying to set up the virtual host I did the following:

I added the static ip address of the local server to /etc/hosts I added a virutalHost to /etc/apache2/sites-available with the DocumentRoot dir/DrupalInstallation I added a2ensite Then restarted apache.

Halfway success. I can get to the main page, but none of the modules load, I tried loading more hosts/variations, started changing all localhost references to the external, but I don't really know what the underlying issue is and I do not know how to diagnose it. The one interesting bit is that if you click on some of the links, it kicks you back out to the index page of the www folder - I don't think the site alias is 100% sticking for requests.

Let me know if there is any sort of log or report I can share to help diagnose/debug this. Any and all help greatly appreciated - thanks!

Answer 1

It sounds like your specific error accessing pages beyond the homepage is related to not having mod_rewrite enabled/configured.

A different approach:

On a bigger scale, it sounds to me like you might not have what it takes to administer the staging server when something goes wrong. If you're unskilled at linux server admin, save yourself the headache and use a preconfigured virtual appliance (e.g. Quickstart, AegirDev, or Walid) instead of the dedicated box. If your staging box isn't beefy enough to handle hosting virtual machines, then just run the QuickStart install scripts over a base uBuntu build.

Now that you know your staging server is working and runs imported Drupal sites successfully, install git, create a shared repo, and make sure you and your developers are setup to use git as their source control in their IDE.