Setup short and easy to remember URL for multi-site in Windows local PC

When developing on multi-site in our local development environment we wanted a short and easy to remember URL for each site. We will take a look on how to setup http://webfoobar and http://myotherwebsite address for our sites. The following instructions are for Windows with XAMPP web server solution stack package.

1. First we will edit the C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts file to register the URL name of each site we are developing in XAMPP and append the following codes:

     
   127.0.0.1       webfoobar
   127.0.0.1       myotherwebsite
     
   

2. Append the following codes in C:\xampp\apache\conf\httpd.conf file:

     
   <Directory "C:/xampp/htdocs/drupalsites">
       Options Indexes FollowSymLinks Includes ExecCGI
       AllowOverride All
       Order allow,deny
       Allow from all
   </Directory>
     
   

3. Lastly, append the following codes in C:\xampp\apache\conf\extra\httpd-vhosts.conf file:

     
   <VirtualHost *:80>
      DocumentRoot "C:\xampp\htdocs\drupalsites"
      ServerName webfoobar
   </VirtualHost>
   
   <VirtualHost *:80>
      DocumentRoot "C:\xampp\htdocs\drupalsites"
      ServerName myotherwebsite
   </VirtualHost>
     
   

4. Restart your Apache web server and you can now access http://webfoobar and http://myotherwebsite in your browser.