Temporary test domain name or way to achieve this

Question

HiI created a multi install with a single website and was able to do that because there was a working IP address.Now I have 1 site there however I can’t use the ip address (or can I) to go to the NEW folder for the new site to test.In previous hosting scenarios I was able to turn on what was called a testing url which gave access to a folder. I tried this in my sites-available block…rewrite ^caribbean-diving.com/newsite$ var/www/newsite.com redirect;This didn’t work as the old site just 404’d I have also tried to edit the /sites-available/digitalocean file which as I understand is the default from my one click install of LEMP. So I thought this could be the file the dedicated IP address could root through first…so I pointed the root directive to my new sites folder of that but it didn’t do anything and I still get to my initial website. How to achieve this?Thanks

DigitalCarrot · Answer

A better option might be to simply create a symbolic link.

A symbolic link is part of your file system (nothing to do with Apache or nginx).

It creates a “virtual” directory which maps to a directory elsewhere in the file system.

You would run this via the command line (make sure the newsite folder doesn’t already exist):

ln -s /var/www/newsite.com /var/www/caribbean-diving.com/newsite

This creates a “vitual” link under /var/www/caribbean-diving.com/newsite which maps to /var/www/newsite.com

Anyone visiting http://caribbean-diving.com/newsite will see the contents of /var/www/newsite.com

DigitalCarrot · Answer

Out of interest what operating system are you using locally on your own computer?

If you’re using Windows you can edit the file C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts and add a line like this:

2.2.2.2 testdomain.com

Replace 2.2.2.2 with the IP address of your droplet.

testdomain.com will then map to your droplet from your local work station, bypassing any external DNS lookup.

Setup a new virtual host under sites-enabled.conf for testdomain.com and away you go.

Calvin Crane · Answer

In my case what seems to have been lacking is a default server and now it seems to be working and what @DigitalCarrot would have got had I posted my server block code…many thanks to you @DigitalCarrot

SO in my default site block I now have this

server {
        listen 80 default_server;
        listen [::]:80 default_server;

Vs

server {
        listen 80;
        listen [::]:80;

Now when I use the IP address remotely I can access what this default site points to…

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Temporary test domain name or way to achieve this

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