Managing local hosts on Windows XP

The first thing to do is to locate the host file, which is typically under /windows/system32/drivers/etc. Usually this file contains the following line by default:

127.0.0.1    localhost

Then you can add the name of your local host, which must correspond to a physical directory on your PC:

127.0.0.1    localhost
127.0.0.2    yoursite

It doesn't matter whether you use "yoursite" or "yoursite.com" or even "www.yoursite.com": the important thing is that this name must correspond to a real directory. Done this, you can create a directory structure inside this folder, for example yoursite/htdocs and add a VirtualHost directive in Apache's httpd.conf file by also setting the DocumentRoot directive to a directory of your choice (in this case you can choose htdocs).

Note how the IP trick works: the last number on the right has been incremented by 1 (127.0.0.2), so you can add many other hosts to the host file. Always remember to edit the configuration file of Apache or, even better, use a custom .htaccess file.

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