treating a subdirectory like a web root directory in xampp

Question

I am running Xampp on a Windows 7 machine. I have a website that is running off a directory in my web root. I access the website by going to http://localhost/foobar.

I would like to set it up so that I can point my local browser to say, http://foobar, and have it treat the foobar directory like the web root directory.

Is that a matter of changing the hosts file or configuration on apache?

Solution

To get your browser to look for http://foobar on your local machine you'll have to add this line to your host file

127.0.0.1 foobar

Then add a virtual host in your Apache http.conf file,

<VirtualHost *:80>
    DocumentRoot path/to/foobar
    ServerName foobar
</VirtualHost>

You may also have to add another virtual host

<VirtualHost *:80>
    DocumentRoot path/to
    ServerName localhost
ServerAlias 127.0.0.*
</VirtualHost>

Comments

[Evil E]

Thanks, Musa, that worked great! The ServerAlias part was not necessary.

[Evil E]

Some additional info, with xampp the http.conf included the file httpd-vhosts.conf, which is where I made my changes. I also had to uncomment the line NameVirtualHost *:80 to get it to work.

[Talon]

I get: Access forbidden! You don't have permission to access the requested directory. There is either no index document or the directory is read-protected.

[Markus Bruckner]

@Talon Make sure Apache (or whatever server you are using) has access to the directory. For example, storing the data in your user directory C:\users\... might be problematic.