A small solution in follow up of the document root issue drm brought up in a previous post. Setting the correct $_SERVER["document_root"] value for your vhost_alias site.

The problem is a long ago confirmed yet still not solved bug in apache mod_vhost_alias, however with a little PHP magic it was easy fixable in my local XAMPP configuration using the php_admin_value directive in the vhost configuration.

Step 1

Open the httpd_vhosts.conf located in the /Applictions/XAMPP/etc/extra folder and add the following line to the virtual_host definition

php_admin_value auto_prepend_file /Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/lib/php/fix_docroot.php

So I ended up with a httpd_vhost configuration looking like this :

<VirtualHost *:80>
	ServerName dev.local
	ServerAlias *.dev.local
	ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
	VirtualDocumentRoot "/Users/rene/Sites/%1"
	VirtualDocumentRoot "/Users/rene/Sites/%-3+/"
	<Directory /Users/rene/Sites/>
		Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
		AllowOverride All
		Order allow,deny
		Allow from all
	</Directory>
	php_admin_value auto_prepend_file /Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/lib/php/fix_docroot.php
</Virtualhost>

Step 2

Next up is creating a small php str_replace function in fix_docroot.php , which is loaded and executed at every request.

Open up your favorite code editor, and create a file called fix_docroot.php at /Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/lib/php/ and paste the following chunk of code in it.

<?php
$_SERVER["ORG_DOCUMENT_ROOT"] = $_SERVER["DOCUMENT_ROOT"];
$_SERVER["DOCUMENT_ROOT"] = str_replace($_SERVER["SCRIPT_NAME"], '',$_SERVER["SCRIPT_FILENAME"]);
?>

Save it, restart apache and the values should be set correctly, with the old value still available in $_SERVER["ORG_DOCUMENT_ROOT"] just in case it is needed for something.