On my fresh new virtual machine from Bytemark I’ve installed apache, mysql and everything else needed to run TYPO3 4.02 - and it works! To allow me to delegate some admin procedures I’ve installed webmin and I’ve created some nifty links on my ubuntu desktop that allow me Nautilus access over ssh straight into the filesystem. For everyday admin and setup I find myself preferring the CLI (again over ssh) and I try to test everything beforehand on my “spare” office server.

So, I can gain all the required access, I can build sites in Typo3 and I can click around the webmin interface. What I can’t do right now is get the server to respond correctly to the first test domain I’m using in preparation for hosting the 100 or so that we intend eventually hosting. To date I’ve also ducked out of all email config for now - that being the hardest bit and least well defined in terms of our requirements.

Everything is working under the default <account>.vm.bytemark.co.uk domain that points to our IP address. To add my test domain I headed over to http://www.zoneedit.com/ who kindly host the DNS for my private domain bracewell.org and tweaked the A records accordingly.

A wee wait for propagation (or more likely an impatient sudo vi /etc/hosts) and lo! pointing the firefox at http://bracewell.org resolves to the holding page I erected in the apache default.

Now I hopefully headed into the TYPO3 backend and added a domain record to a page, refreshed the cache and reloaded the browser. It was all going so well i really expected this to be enough but no, I get the same holding page

Some time later…

I like to sleep on stuff like this. That didn’t help.
I write this entry and suddenly it all becomes glaringly obvious where it’s going wrong. Before I attempted to get TYPO3 working I posted said holding page as index.html. Following TYPO3 installation I’d left the holding page while I migrated some content over. The html file is preferred over the php index page so TYPO3 never gets to attempt to resolve the domain to one of its pages.

mv /var/www/index.html /var/www/.index.html

(this command “moves” index.html and renames it to .index.html - the dot is all that’s needed to stop it being served as the default document while leaving it available for renaming back if I need to- I could have renamed it to e.g. index.html.old the point is I didn’t delete it)

That was all it took! If I’d never bothered with my poncey holding page the problem would never had occurred.

So, hosting multiple domains in TYPO3 really is as straightforward as pointing the DNS and adding a domain record on your target page in the TYPO3 backend… so far.