Recall from the first post the reason I began this blog, my best friend needed an outlet for her collection of artworks and body care supplies. Let’s take a look at how I setup her website.

Acquiring the domain and web space

I use Name Cheap for my domains. They’re pretty cheap with a fairly easy admin dashboard. I usually get the domain then point the DNS records to Digital Ocean (DO) where I acquire web space. DO makes it really easy to get space on the web and point your domains to their droplets, but that’s a tutorial for another time, if you’re interested let me know in the comments.

Setting up the website directories

Using a droplet I already own, to keep costs down, running Apache2 I put one website in /var/www/website1.com and added /var/www/getthisoutofmycloset.shop. Allowed my non-root user modification permissions, $ sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /var/www/getthisoutofmycloset.shop, and allowed read access, sudo chmod -R 755 /var/www.

Next I added a file within the shop directory labeled index.html to show something that’ll tell me the virtual hosts are working:

<html>
  <head>
    <title>Get This Out of My Closet Shop</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>Success! The virtual host is working!</h1>
  </body>
</html>

Create the virtual hosts

Apache gives us a template that we can copy with $ sudo cp /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf /etc/apache2/sites-available/getthisoutofmycloset.shop.conf and edit to looks like this:

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerAdmin thejenniferhaggerty@protonmail.com
  ServerName getthisoutofmycloset.shop
  ServerAlias www.getthisoutofmycloset.shop
  DocumentRoot /var/www/getthisoutofmycloset.shop
  ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
  CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

Afterwards we enable the site with $ sudo a2ensite getthisoutofmycloset.shop.conf, restart Apache $ sudo systemctl restart apache2, and test the results by navigating to http://getthisoutofmycloset.shop.

At the time of this writing it should show “Success! The virtual host is working!”.

Next up

Installing WordPress, SSL encryption, and WooCommerce.

Thank you for reading!