Get alerted when assets are down, slow, or vulnerable to SSL attacks—all free for a month. Learn more

Question

Set Default Website For Apache2 if IP address is typed

I want my one of my websites in the virtualhosts configured apache2 (LAMP) droplet. So if anyone types x.x.x.x IP in their browser this ‘default’ website is displayed.

How can one configure this behavior?

Submit an answer

This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

Sign In or Sign Up to Answer

These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.

KFSys • September 10, 2020
Pinned Answer

Hi all,

In Ubuntu, if you want to make A website load when the droplet’s IP address is loaded in your browser https://XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX there are a couple of steps that need to be followed.

The change you need to implement is to your default configuration file. This file can be found in directory - /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/

Once you are in there, open the file 000-default.conf. In it, find the line that says

DocumentRoot /var/www/html

And change it to your domain’s root directory.

Let’s say your domain is example.com. Usually, your DocumentRoot is configured to be in /var/www/domain.com or /var/www/html/domain.com. Set the DocumentRoot to the path. If you are uncertain about the DocumentRoot, you can check it from your domain’s configuration file again found in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/.

Once the change has been done to /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default.conf don’t forget to restart apache

service apache2 restart

Regards, KFSys

Want to learn more? Join the DigitalOcean Community!

Join our DigitalOcean community of over a million developers for free! Get help and share knowledge in Q&A, subscribe to topics of interest, and get courses and tools that will help you grow as a developer and scale your project or business.

FireWood • January 2, 2018

I have the same problem and the solution is: config your default site in 000-default.conf, and enable it, restart the apache2. Then the default site will be opened if you typed the IP address.

Ramses • January 28, 2016

In your file “/etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf” add a virtualhost and setup a landing page in your directory “/var/www/html/defaultsite”

NameVirtualHost :80 <VirtualHost default:> DocumentRoot /var/www/html/defaultsite </VirtualHost>

bayronnjonathan • October 1, 2019

Hi I had the same problem once i used Apache2 in Debian, my solution was the following steps:

Step 1: Create a directory for your default web site, change the propietary of that dircetory and enable the virtual host with the following commands.

cd /var/www
sudo mkdir mywebsite
chown $USERNAME:www-data mywebsite
sudo a2ensite 000-default.conf

Step 2: Execute this command

sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf

verify that file contains all this

<VirtualHost *:80>

	DirectoryIndex index.php index.html index.htm

	ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
	DocumentRoot /var/www/mywebsite
	ServerName YOUR_DOMAIN_NAME.com
	ServerAlias www.YOUR_DOMAIN_NAME.com

</VirtualHost>

Step 3: create your index.php page and reload the service.

touch /var/www/mywebsite/index.php
systemctl reload apache2

Edit your index.php and add all your stuff. finally go to your web browser and type in the url localhost.

Try DigitalOcean for free

Click below to sign up and get $200 of credit to try our products over 60 days!

Sign up