Drupal 8: Multi-sites in subdirectories not working

Question

I followed this tutorial(Drupal 7) but it not worked for me(Drupal 8):

• Multi-site in subdirectories https://www.drupal.org/docs/7/multisite-drupal/multi-site-in-subdirectories

This is my enviroment:

• CentOs 7 with SELinux(mode: enforcing)
• Varnish 4.0.3
• Apache 2.4.23
• Drupal 8.2.4

I need to create the next structure of sites:

• / <-- First site
• /site2 <-- Second site
• /site3 <-- Third site

In the file sites/sites.php i have:

$sites['localhost.site2'] = 'site2';
$sites['localhost.site3'] = 'site3';

In the directory sites/ i have:

• default/
• site2.localhost
• site3.localhost

In the root of the drupal o have the next symlinks to .:

• site2 -> .
• site3 -> .

In my .htaccess file i have:

  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/site2/(.*)$
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /site2/index.php [L,QSA]

  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/site3/(.*)$
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /site3/index.php [L,QSA]

When i tried to access to each subsite, he shows me the default. What is wrong?

Answer 1

• Download latest D8 version.
• Extract and navigate into the directory: /drupal/sites/
• Create sites.php duplicating example.sites.php

• Add the code to sites.php

  $sites = array( 'dogs.multisite.local' => 'dogs', 'multisite.local.cats' => 'cats', );

• Create two folders named 'cats' and 'dogs' on the sites folder.

  /drupal/sites/dogs/
  /drupal/sites/cats/
  

• The /drupal/sites/default/ site will have default files we need to copy into each of our sites. Copy these files using the cp command in the sites directory:

  cp default/default.settings.php dogs/settings.php
  cp default/default.settings.php cats/settings.php    
  cp default/default.services.yml dogs/services.yml
  cp default/default.services.yml cats/services.yml
  

• Setup virtualhost

  hosts

   127.0.0.1  multisite.local
  

  httpd-vhosts.conf

  <VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerAdmin [email protected]
  DocumentRoot "/opt/lampp/htdocs/drupal"
  ServerName multisite.local
  ServerAlias    *.multisite.local multisite.local.*
  ErrorLog "logs/multisite.local-error_log"
  CustomLog "logs/multisite.local-access_log" common
  </VirtualHost>
  

• Once it is done, you can start the installation of your new website in a multisite context from the urls:

     http://dogs.multisite.local/
     http://multisite.local.cats/
  

Answer 2

I suggest you to use drush. It will make your life way easier:

$ drush site-install --db-url=mysql://db_user:[email protected]/sample_site_db --sites-subdir=sample.subsite.com --yes

Please note that drush will generate all the proper config for you. Then you can check how it is actually when you want to go "manual".

And here you have a full list of steps to setup a Multisite on Drupal 8: https://evolvingweb.ca/blog/drupal-8-configuration-management-multi-site

Answer 3

If you really want to make your life easy, use Aegir. It does all of this automatically via point and click. From the official Drupal documentation on multisite:

It should be noted, however, that using the Aegir hosting system is preferred. It does all of the heavy lifting for you using secure best practices including automatically configuring virtual hosts for both Apache and Nginx, adding HTTPS support, running Composer commands, etc. See the documentation for setting up a "platform", Aegir-speak for a multisite codebase.

For your use case, you'll need to enable the (Site) Subdirectories module, which ships with core Aegir.

No command-line work is necessary at all as this is all done for you in the back-end.