All the directives in this module interpolate a string into a pathname. The interpolated string (henceforth called the "name") may be either the server name (see the UseCanonicalName directive for details on how this is determined) or the IP address of the virtual host on the server in dotted-quad format. The interpolation is controlled by specifiers inspired by printf which have a number of formats:

N and M are used to specify substrings of the name. N selects from the dot-separated components of the name, and M selects characters within whatever N has selected. M is optional and defaults to zero if it isn't present; the dot must be present if and only if M is present. The interpretation is as follows:

If N or M is greater than the number of parts available a single underscore is interpolated.

For simple name-based virtual hosts you might use the following directives in your server configuration file:

A request for http://www.example.com/directory/file.html will be satisfied by the file /usr/local/apache/vhosts/www.example.com/directory/file.html.

For a very large number of virtual hosts it is a good idea to arrange the files to reduce the size of the vhosts directory. To do this you might use the following in your configuration file:

A request for http://www.domain.example.com/directory/file.html will be satisfied by the file /usr/local/apache/vhosts/example.com/d/o/m/domain/directory/file.html.

A more even spread of files can be achieved by hashing from the end of the name, for example:

The example request would come from /usr/local/apache/vhosts/example.com/n/i/a/domain/directory/file.html.

Alternatively you might use:

The example request would come from /usr/local/apache/vhosts/example.com/d/o/m/ain/directory/file.html.

A very common request by users is the ability to point multiple domains to multiple document roots without having to worry about the length or number of parts of the hostname being requested. If the requested hostname is sub.www.domain.example.com instead of simply www.domain.example.com, then using %3+ will result in the document root being /usr/local/apache/vhosts/domain.example.com/... instead of the intended example.com directory. In such cases, it can be beneficial to use the combination %-2.0.%-1.0, which will always yield the domain name and the tld, for example example.com regardless of the number of subdomains appended to the hostname. As such, one can make a configuration that will direct all first, second or third level subdomains to the same directory:

In the example above, both www.example.com as well as www.sub.example.com or example.com will all point to /usr/local/apache/vhosts/example.com.

For IP-based virtual hosting you might use the following in your configuration file:

A request for http://www.domain.example.com/directory/file.html would be satisfied by the file /usr/local/apache/vhosts/10/20/30/40/docs/directory/file.html if the IP address of www.domain.example.com were 10.20.30.40. A request for http://www.domain.example.com/cgi-bin/script.pl would be satisfied by executing the program /usr/local/apache/vhosts/10/20/30/40/cgi-bin/script.pl.

If you want to include the . character in a VirtualDocumentRoot directive, but it clashes with a % directive, you can work around the problem in the following way:

A request for http://www.domain.example.com/directory/file.html will be satisfied by the file /usr/local/apache/vhosts/domain.example/directory/file.html.

The LogFormat directives %V and %A are useful in conjunction with this module.