Apache2 VirtualHost – How to Disable Default VirtualHost

apache-2.2virtualhost

In apache2 by design, any http request with an unknown Host will be directed to the first loaded VirtualHost. Is there a way to disable this feature? Said differently, I want to have a web server where the user may only get to explicitly named VirtualHost definitions. Any other hostname not explicitly mentioned in a ServerName or ServerAlias line should be silently ignored.

Is this possible?

Listen 80
NameVirtualHost *

<VirtualHost _default_:*>
# Anything matching this host should be silently ignored.
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *>
DocumentRoot /www/example1
ServerName www.example.com
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *>
DocumentRoot /www/example2
ServerName www.example.org
</VirtualHost>

Update: As suggested below and elsewhere, silently ignoring a request might not be a good idea and perhaps breaks the RFC's for HTTP. However, since virtual hosts are designed to simulate have multiple separate physical HTTP servers, the silent ignore approach does not seem unreasonable to me. It would be the same as IP-based virtual hosting and firewalling off some of the IPs (perhaps not for all clients).

Best Answer

I'm not sure that "silently failing" is a good idea. You should give the client at least some indication of what happened. Perhaps you could send an http 410 "gone" error. Something like this should do the trick:

RewriteRule ^.*$ - [G]

In addition, you should be able to specify a custom 410 error document, which could just be a blank html page.

Related Solutions

Apache2 multiple hostnames redirected to one

To be fairly honest with you, the best approch i can see for this would be if you setup your main domain normally like this:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName www.example.com
    DocumentRoot /www/domain 
</virtualhost>

Then you create a new virtualhost that will hold all domains you want to redirect like this:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName example.com
    ServerAlias foo.example.com bar.example.com others.example.com
    DocumentRoot /www/redirect_folder 
</virtualhost>

Inside that folder make a simple index.php page that summons the 301 so any domains hold in there will be redirect to your main domain with the 301 code.

<?
Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
Header( "Location: http://www.example.com" );
?>

Why do you think it is better this way ?

This way you won't have to keep updating a bunch of places everytime you have a new domain to hold and redirct to your main domain and it won't be serving your users with the current name but will actually redirect them to your main domain in question.

If you are the server owner you can make it even better, you can put the 2nd virtualhost as the first virtualhost in your httpd.conf of vhost.conf file and whenever you hit the IP of your server it will lead you to the redirection page which will lead your users to the main domain in this case instead of having to set a bunch of ServerAlias you can just create the DNS A record for that given subdomain or domain leading to your IP and the server will take care of the rest.

In this last case all you would need for your virtual host would be:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName example.com
    DocumentRoot /www/redirect_folder 
</virtualhost>

as you dont need the ServerAlias since every and each request that hits your server IP will go to your first vhost.

In addition if you wanted to do this using .htaccess, it would be something like this i belive:

RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^foo.example.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

Linux – Apache Virtual Hosts Not Working

remove the NameVirtualHost *:80 or comment it #NameVirtualHost

Related Topic

Ssl – ServerAlias without www not working on SSL virtualhost