VirtualHosts not working properly

I am running Ubuntu Gnome 14.04, I apt-get installed apache2, php and mysql. From there, localhost was working fine, running from the /var/www/html/ directory.

I created a new file, /etc/apache2/sites-available/laravel.example.conf, and mimicked the 000-default.conf file that already existed in that folder:

<VirtualHost *:80> ServerName laravel.example ServerAlias ServerAdmin DocumentRoot /var/www/sites/laravel.example ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/laravel.example_error.log CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/laravel.example_access.log combined
</VirtualHost>
# vim: syntax=apache ts=4 sw=4 sts=4 sr noet

I created the folder at /var/www/sites/laravel.example, added in 127.0.0.1 laravel.example to /etc/hosts, ran a2ensite laravel.example.conf, restarted apache, but still just get Web page not available when I try load it. Any ideas?

2 Answers

You need to set ownership / permissions of the directories and files to e readable by www-data

Personally I use:

sudo chown -R root:www-data /var/www
chmod 750 /var/www/sites
chmod 750 /var/www/sites/sites/laravel.example
chmod 640 /var/www/sites/sites/

As mentioned in my comment, I fixed this issue by chowning the /var/www/ directory recursively to my current user, and chmodding the directory to 755, restarted and it seemed to be working, so hopefully this was the actual fix.