What is it?

A little script to quickly add virtual hosts to your local Apache configuration for development purposes on Mac OS X.

Given a name like "example.local" and a path to the files for the site root directory, it will make the site appear at http://example.local.

Currently it has been tested on Apache 2.4.23 in Mac OS Sierra.
It is also reported to work on Apache 2.4.28 in Mac OS El Capitan.

Installation

Make a directory to contain all the generated vhost config files:

sudo mkdir /etc/apache2/extra/vhosts

Add this line to your /etc/apache2/httpd.conf file:

Include /private/etc/apache2/extra/vhosts/*.conf

Do not restart Apache on this step.

Place the vhostman.rb to somewhere, for instance, somewhere in your home dir and add alias for this into your .bash_profile, like:

alias vhostman="sudo $HOME/somewhere/vhostman.rb"

Ensure it's executable:

chmod 777 $HOME/somewhere/vhostman.rb

That's it, now you can start to use it.

Usage

Create folder for your domain in your Sites dir ($HOME/Sites), for instance: example (for real, it doesn't matter how you'll name it)

mkdir $HOME/Sites/example

Next open Terminal and do like this to add example.local (it's what you will type in your browser):

vhostman add example.local $HOME/Sites/example

Apache will be restarted and virtual host config will be applied to get it work.

That’s it! You can view your site in browser: http://example.local.

Fixing issues

bad interpreter: Operation not permitted

If you get an error like this:

bad interpreter: Operation not permitted

Then do this:

xattr -d com.apple.quarantine vhostman.rb

ERROR: Specified webroot dir does not exist

It's possible the webroot path contains a space. In this case enclose the path in quotes, and do not escape spaces with a backslash:

vhostman add example.local "$HOME/path with spaces/Sites/example"