After spending 1 hour trying to figure out how to configure virtual hosts on my local projects installations in Windows 8.1 .. I finally got it working ; so I decided to write a quick tutorial about it 🙂

What we will create is  a virtual host under the name; “myproject”.  Change this to reflect your project alias name.

Edit hosts file

Go to

C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc

Open “hosts” file using Notepad or so with admin privileges (You need to open notepad as admin: “run as admin”, this way you can save the changes inside the hosts file) and add the following to its end;

127.0.0.1 myproject

Save it and close.

Allow Virtual Hosts in httpd.conf

I’m using wampserver so to edit this apache configuration file, i left click on wamp tray icon and Apache -> httpd.conf. This opens the file in notepad.

Search for

# Virtual hosts
# Include conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf

and comment out

Include conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf

This enables virtual hosts on Apache.

Add and configure virtual hosts individual projects

Now the only thing left to do is to add our projects to the httpd-vhosts.conf file located, depending on your setup in;

Apache2.4.4\conf\extra

In this file, some tutorials recommand adding localhost to the list of virtual hosts, like so;

<VirtualHost *:80>
DocumentRoot "d:/www"
ServerName localhost
ServerAlias localhost
<Directory "d:/www">
AllowOverride All
Require local
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Then at the bottom of it, you add your project

<VirtualHost *:80>
DocumentRoot "d:/projects/myproject"
ServerName zaintest
<Directory "d:/projects/myproject">
AllowOverride All
Require local
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>

After you have done all the steps, restart wampserver for the configuration to be set.

That’s it you have  a running virtual host 🙂