Prefix on vhost document root

[supernovi]

Hi

I'm hoping someone can help me.

I've installed XAMPP and followed this simple guide to setting up vhosts http://jonathannicol.com/blog/2012/03/11/configuring-virtualhosts-in-xampp-on-mac/ however my vhost reports as 404. I've been trying everything I can think of and last night started checking the error log for apache when I see it complaining about a none existing directory, here I can see the directory is '/Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/htdocs/<someweirdstring>/Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/htdocs/base' however all I put in my vhost was '/Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/htdocs/base' clearly something is adding a prefix to the directory string.

Can someone explain why it's doing this? It obviously won't work as that directory doesn't exist.

Thanks in advance.

[Nobbie]

clearly something is adding a prefix to the directory string.

This "something" ought to be a previously installed software (WordPress, Joomla or whatever), which puts a .htaccess file into your htdocs and may do some redirections. And it does not expect a "base" subfolder in that context. Thats what i believe what happens.

Anyway, it is never a good idea to run a VirtualHost in a subdirectory of the DocumentRoot (i.e. the htdocs folder). Put the the VirtualHost to the same level as the htdocs folder (at least), so they cannot collide. For example, use /Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/base instead of /Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/htdocs/base. Or /Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/VirtualHosts/base (so you can easily see, which VirtualHosts you have on your system).

[supernovi]

There is no software installed, I've just put a dummy index.php in there that output 'Hello world'. It's something to do with the apache conf I'm sure. I just don't know where it is.

The dir ideally would be somewhere else like you suggest, I just know for sure it works at that location (permissions etc) as the xampp default site works fine. I'll move it once I've figured out the above.

[Altrea]

show us your Apache config, your vhost config and tell us what "<someweirdstring>" means.
Without detailed information it is not possible to provide specific help