I’ve tried this on a Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) with Apache2. Here is what we are trying to setup:

• Subdomain for your web project: http://mysubdomain.mydomain.com (say, http://staging.mykillerapp.com)
  

• You wish to give restricted access to a people in your team, to deploy the project. You don’t wish to give them sudo or admin rights to your Linux box.

Creating a Sub-domain

Your hosting provider is likely to give you a web-based domain management tool (CPanel or something else). Add a DNS “A record” as follows:

subdomain      PUBLICIPADDRESS      A

For example:

staging      x.x.x.x      A

Create a non-root user account to manage your application

$ adduser staging

I’m assuming that staging home is the usual /home/staging. Lets create a www under it, which will serve as the root directory for our virtual host /home/staging/www/

Enable the Apache Virtual Host Module

sudo a2enmod vhost_alias

Create a virtual host configuration for Apache2

Apache2 tracks the virtual hosts configurations in this location: /etc/apache2/sites-available/. There will be a default config file; Lets make a copy of that file at the same directory location.

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$ cd /etc/apache2/sites-available/
$ cp default staging
$ vi staging

Make your virtual host file look like this:

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<VirtualHost *:80>
 
        ServerName staging.mykillerapp.com
        ServerAdmin appadmin@mykillerapp.com
        DocumentRoot /home/staging/www/
 
        <Directory />
                Options FollowSymLinks
                AllowOverride All
        </Directory>
 
        <Directory /home/staging/www/>
                Options FollowSymLinks MultiViews
                AllowOverride All
                Order allow,deny
                allow from all
        </Directory>
 
        ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/error.log
 
        # Possible values include: debug, info, notice, 
        # warn, error, crit, alert, emerg.
        LogLevel warn
 
        CustomLog /var/log/apache2/access.log combined
 
</VirtualHost>

Enable your virtual host

$ sudo a2ensite staging

This sets up a soft-link in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/ which points to your virtual host config file.

Finally, restart apache

$ sudo service apache2 restart

Hit your virtual host at http://staging.mykillerapp.com