Debian – a2ensite doesn’t show all sites in /etc/apache2/sites-available

Your settings are right, that should work like you expected. Maybe you are overriding Options -Indexes somewhere deeper in your directory tree or in another vHost for example.

You can potentially completed ditch name-based virtual hosting completely, turn off all your sites-enabled files, and put VirtualDocumentRoot in the main server config.

More likely, what you'll want to do is create a new vhost in sites-available and symlink it to sites-enabled normally, having it act as a catch all. Naming is significant; it needs to be the first file alphabetically in order to be treated as a default.

So:

• Create an alphabetically-early file that will get loaded first, to be treated as default, such as /etc/apache2/sites-available/0-dynamic.

• Give the new vhost file some content like this:

  <VirtualHost *:80>
      ServerName catchall
      VirtualDocumentRoot /path/to/domains/%0
      <Directory /path/to/domains>
          Order Allow,Deny
          Allow from all
      </Directory>
  </VirtualHost>
  

• Enable it: a2ensite 0-dynamic. (if the default is still in place at /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default, rename it so it comes after the new one alphabetically.

This configuration will serve up the dynamically-configured sites from the VirtualDocumentRoot, but can be overridden and served by a different <VirtualHost> when that block has a ServerName or ServerAlias that matches the request. This can be useful if your "blanket" vhost's settings are not appropriate for specific domains.

Edit: (Adding some things I experienced trying to set this up that may be helpful. All credit goes to the original author!)

VirtualDocumentRoot

If you get an error saying

Invalid command 'VirtualDocumentRoot', perhaps misspelled...

check to make sure the vhost_alias module is enabled. If it's not, run

>sudo a2enmod vhost_alias

Handling leading www

Add the following rules (be sure to replace example with your actual domain) to the 0-default file to handle www.example.com and example.com.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.example.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

In this example, the www is stripped for all requests, so the directory should be example.com.