Using OS X Server As Internal Testing Web Server

Question

Hi
First off, I'll admit it: I'm not a server bod by any stretch of the imagination. I'm a web designer/developer and we've just got a copy of OS X Server and one of the things we'd like to move away from is the developers in our company developing sites locally (using MAMP Pro) and instead, to have them develop onto OS X Server, and then deploy from that to our live web server once the site is ready to go live.
So, I've tried setting up a few sites, and I'll be honest, I'm 100% stumped. I'm assuming that what we want can be easily handled by OS X Server; effectively, it should serve multiple virtual hosts using domain names such as test.dev etc as well as run PHP and MySQL.
Are there any "dummies" guides out there? I assume we'll need to get to grips with the DNS and Web aspects of the Server Admin; will we also need to set up the developer Macs to get look at OS X Server for DNS too?
So many questions, I know!! Any help greatly appreciated.
Ta
Phil

Answer 1

From what I can see, you got the answer. Use /etc/hosts or DNS.
That's basically how this web stuff and virtual hosting works, after all.
The web client acquires the IP address of the web server associated with the specified host name, and it is the IP address that is used for the IP connection to the web server, and it is the host name that's passed over the http connection (as data) that's used to select a virtual host.
AFAIK, there's no tool for this, and given you've already Googled around for it, I won't spend any time with that.
I haven't looked at the serveradmin command line to see if adding a virtual host is feasible there from the shell, but the /etc/hosts stuff is trivial.
Get somebody in that knows a little bash, or [go learn it yourself|http://tldp.org/HOWTO/pdf/Bash-Prog-Intro-HOWTO.pdf]. There are [Apple-specific shell and command features|http://images.apple.com/server/macosx/docs/IntroCommand_Line_Adminv10.6.pdf] available, too. This stuff could easily be part of a deployment script or makefile script and tied to your version-control system, too.
Or sequence and write up and document the manual steps involved.
And I'd probably punt on the whole wide-open domain-naming stuff if you're not working with the /etc/hosts approach as (with DNS) that's more work than its worth. In either case, I'd likely just use hostnames within an existing domain. Makes mistakes easier to spot when you go into production, too, as you can search for references to your domain name(s) via grep or such, and swap those for relative paths. If you unintentionally embed the customer's domain name(s), that's typically (much) harder to search for.