[FIXED] How to have dynamic virtual hosts for all domains except localhost

Issue

A bit of background: I've been wanting to set up dynamic virtual hosts for a while now. Basically I just wanted to be able to plop a folder into my virtual hosts folder and just have it work without any other configuration. I found out that in chrome any subdomain of .localhost will behave the same as localhost. This means that I can use .localhost as a TLD for all my projects and I don't have to edit my HOSTS file for every new virtual host I want to add.

I read the documentation on https://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/vhosts/mass.html and figured out how to have dynamic virtual hosts based on the host header.

After reading through that page and other resources on the internet, I came up with the following configuration in my httpd-vhosts.conf file. This uses the part before the .localhost to determine the folder name.

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerAdmin admin@localhost
    
    # Get the server name from the Host header
    UseCanonicalName Off
    
    # Log
    LogFormat "%V %h %l %u %t \"%r\" %s %b" vcommon
    CustomLog logs/vhost_access.log vcommon
    ErrorLog logs/vhost_error.log
    
    # Match domain name against a folder
    VirtualDocumentRoot "C:/vhosts/%-2+"
    
    <Directory "C:/vhosts/*">
        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
        AllowOverride All
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
        Require all granted
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

So with this set-up, I can create a new folder in the vhosts folder that contains all my html documents. So, for instance, if I create a folder named project1 I can access that folder by going to http://project1.localhost.

Now my main problem is that I don't always need to create a new virtual host. I just want to create a random php file and access it by going to http://localhost/index.php. However, with the above configuration, just using http://localhost caused an error. Probably because the pattern in the VirtualDocumentRoot directive is using the subdomain of localhost and there is no subdomain when I just use http://localhost.

tl;dr:

Given the configuration above, is there any way to have a hard-coded virtual host for localhost and have dynamic virtual hosts for subdomains of localhost?

Or, how can I create a configuration that would allow me to have this:

http://localhost -----------------> C:/vhosts/
http://project1.localhost --------> C:/vhosts/project1
http://project2.localhost --------> C:/vhosts/project2
http://blog.project2.localhost ---> C:/vhosts/project2/blog

Solution

I have a solution but it just solve part of your problems.

<VirtualHost *:80>
   ServerAdmin admin@localhost
   ServerName  localhost
   DocumentRoot "C:/vhosts/"
</VirtualHost>
<VirtualHost *:80>
   ServerAdmin admin@localhost
   ServerName  longnameyoullneveruse.blabla.localhost
   ServerAlias  *.localhost
   DocumentRoot "C:/vhosts/"
   RewriteEngine On
   RewriteMap lowercase int:tolower
   RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(.*)\.localhost$
   RewriteRule ^(.*)$ "C:/vhosts/${lowercase:%1}/$1"
   # you should use all lowercase for subfolders' name
</VirtualHost>

This should meets the first three lines of your requirement:

http://localhost -----------------> C:/vhosts/
http://project1.localhost --------> C:/vhosts/project1
http://project2.localhost --------> C:/vhosts/project2

Answered By - Shiji.J

Answer Checked By - Clifford M. (PHPFixing Volunteer)