VPS Experience

Setup Virtual Hosts into VPS

Execute the following commands after ssh into vps:

sudo mkdir -p /var/www/example.com
sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /var/www/example.com
cd /var/www/
sudo chown www-data:www-data * -R 
sudo usermod -a -G www-data username-logged-in-as
cd
sudo nano /var/www/example.com/index.html

Add a basic html page for now:

<html>
<head>
<title>www.example.com</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Success: You Have Set Up a Virtual Host</h1>
</body>
</html>

Setup sites-available by copying the default setup:

sudo cp /etc/apache2/sites-available/default /etc/apache2/sites-available/example.com
sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/example.com

Next setup the domain virtual hosts file:

ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
ServerName example.com
ServerAlias www.example.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/example.com
Redirect 301 http://www.example.com http://example.com

Make sure we have AllowOverride set to All so .htaccess files work properly and make sure Indexes is removed from Options to prevent directory listing:

<Directory /var/www>
    Options FollowSymLinks MultiViews
    AllowOverride All
</Directory>

Let's also prevent hotlinking of files:

SetEnvIf Referer example\.com localreferer
<FilesMatch \.(jpg|png|gif|css|js|pdf|doc|xls|txt)$>
    Order deny,allow
    Deny from all
    Allow from env=localreferer
</FilesMatch>

Activate and restart:

sudo a2ensite example.com
sudo service apache2 restart

MySQL

Add a new database and user for that database:

CREATE DATABASE example;
CREATE USER 'newuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON example . * TO 'newuser'@'localhost';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Dump a database and import a database:

mysqldump -u [username] -p [database name] > [database name].sql
mysql -u [username] -p newdatabase < [database name].sql

Securely copy files over ssh

You can use scp (secure cp(copy)) to copy files from one server (=remote server) to a other server (=remote server).

Coping files from local server to remote server

scp /source/file/ user@ipaddress:/destination/file/

Coping files from one remote server to another remote server

scp user@ipaddressofserverone:/source/file/ user@ipaddressofserver2:/destination/file/

Where

user : Is the user which have the right to access the file and directory, that is supposed to be copied in the case of the from-host, and the user who has the rights to write in the to-host

ipaddressofserverone : Is the name or IP of the host where the source file is

source/file : Is the file(s) that are going to be copied to the destination host, it can be a directory but in that case you need to specify the -r option to copy the contents of the directory

destination/file : Is the name that the copied file is going to take in the to-host, if none is given all copied files are going to keep its names

SCP Options

-p : Preserves the modification and access times, as well as the permissions of the source-file in the destination-file
-q : Do not display the progress bar
-r : Recursive, so it copies the contents of the source-file (directory in this case) recursively
-v : Displays debugging messages

How To Set Up Apache Virtual Hosts on Ubuntu

To create the new Virtual Host File on the apache, you need to set up the apache configuration. It's good idea to create duplicate file rather than creating new. Here is how to do so

sudo cp /etc/apache2/sites-available/default /etc/apache2/sites-available/

Open the newly created configuration file.

sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/

Edit server details of your domain.

<VirtualHost *:80>

ServerAdmin [email protected]

ServerName example.com

ServerAlias www.example.com

DocumentRoot /var/www/example.com/public_html

Now, create shortcut of apache host file.

sudo a2ensite example.com

Retart apache

sudo service apache2 restart

based on digital ocean vps experience