Purpose:

Quickly create multiple websites (http and https) after a standard Apache installation to get rolling right away!

Target audience:

Web developers or systems administrators who want to quickly set up multiple websites on a freshly installed Apache web server for development or testing purposes.

Under the hood:

Developed and tested on a vanilla Ubuntu system.

End results: Quickly set up multiple websites as Named Virtual Hosts.

This script needs you to supply two parameters:

• The webserver home directory where to place the websites (defaults to /var/www/)
• The domains you want to be created.
  • Important note: use domain names without including 'www'. i.e. domain1.com , not www.domain1.com

This script will do the following: 

• Create the Apache site conf file for each website (/etc/apache2/sites-available)
  • domain1.com will be permanently redirected to www.domain1.com
• Auto create self-signed SSL keys for each website (/etc/apache2/ssl)
• Create web home directories with barebones index.html
   
• Auto enables Apache SSL module
• Auto enables both HTTP and HTTPS websites
   
• Add the domains to your /etc/hosts and couple them to 127.0.1.1 (in the localhost range 127.0.0.0/8).

How to run

chmod u+x setup_domains.py
sudo ./setup_domains.py -h  (view the help screen for the switches you need to set)
   -w WEBDIR, --webdir WEBDIR Location of webserver home directory, defaults to /var/www
   -d DOMAINS [DOMAINS ...], --domains DOMAINS [DOMAINS ...]
       List of domains, defaults to domain1.com domain2.com.
       Don't include the 'www.' prefix since that will be taken care of.

sudo ./setup_domains.py -w /var/www -d domain1.com domain2.com

--or--

Look at example.py for how to incorporate the function into your own script