Unable to get Wordpress to work on Apache Virtual Hosts

November 13, 2018 2.6k views
Apache WordPress Quickstart Initial Server Setup Ubuntu 18.04
drewdankworth
By:
drewdankworth

I’m new to servers and Linux in general so pardon me if this is a stupid question.

I’ve been trying to host multiple Wordpress installations on a single droplet. Specifically, I want to host multiple sub-domains. Such as, www.example.com and blog.example.com. I own the domain, and I have setup A records in the DigitalOcean DNS for each of the subdomains.

Apparently Apache Virtual Hosts should let me set up multiple websites on a single server. I followed the DigitalOcean guides on setting up the Virtual Hosts to the letter, but I keep running into a certain error. That is, after I install the virtual hosts, the permalinks don’t seem to work. The website works fine as long as I keep the permalinks in the default format. But the moment I try to change to a custom permalink structure, the whole Wordpress breaks. I can still login, but all posts throw a 404 error. I’m also unable to ‘hide backend’ by changing the URL of the /wp-admin page.

I have checked the .htaccess file as well as the Apache sites-enabled/example.com.conf files to make sure everything is correct. I’m 90% sure I did this right. But I might have missed something.

I’ve attempted to setup the server twice now using the Wordpress One-click installation. I’ve attempted it again, starting from Ubuntu 18.04 and manually installing the LAMP stack, but I ran into the exact same issue. I can’t provide a website link right now because I wiped the server and did without the Virtual Hosts for now, so my website is working (albeit without any subdomains). But if it’s needed I can open a new Droplet and replicate the issue.

If anyone has any idea what is going on, I would love some help. Thanks!

TL;DR - Tried to set up Apache Virtual Hosts for subdomains, but the permalinks don’t work.

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3 Answers
drewdankworth November 13, 2018

I managed to solve the issue. I followed a non-DigitalOcean guide. The main difference was that the new website files were stored in the /var/www/html/example.com instead of /var/www/example.com/public_html. I also didn’t have to play around with .htaccess files either.

I am not sure what caused it to work, but it works now. If anyone can explain the difference, though, that would be nice.

I tried to link the guide here, but my reply was rejected as spam. I’d say just google it.

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carrayville November 15, 2018

thanks, i’m also new on this site

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drewdankworth November 15, 2018

I actually found the specific reason why it didn’t work.

If following the digitalocean LAMP stack guide (I haven’t tested the one-click application), after installation, run the command:

sudo nano /etc/apache2/apache2.conf

Look for the section that says:

<Directory /var/www/>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
Require all granted
</Directory>

and change the AllowOverride line to:

AllowOverride All

That solved my issue completely. Hope it helps for you too.

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