This project allows you to serve a fancy page as an apache fallback vhost:

Besides its coolness, this adds a little more security since it makes you aware of which vhost will be served if apache couldn't match any of your defined vhosts at first.

This project contains translations for both english and french languages, one or another being picked once visiting / depending on preferred client language. Don't hesitate to contribute to add new fresh translations! If you want to customize its appearance, you can fork this project and edit the src/AppBundle/Resources/views/index.html.twig file.

This project is compatible with Simple-Deployment-Script. See Symfony 2 & 3 notes if you need some help on deploying this project to your web server. Don't miss the scss pass part.

Once done, create an apache vhost matching this project, or customize the usually unused default.conf or 000-default.conf vhost file in /etc/apache2/sites-available/ directory. You should not set neither ServerName nor ServerAlias directives to let apache use it as the default vhost:

<VirtualHost *:80>
	DocumentRoot /var/www/Apache-Fallback-Page/web/
	<Directory "/var/www/Apache-Fallback-Page/web/">
		DirectoryIndex app.php
		Options -Indexes FollowSymLinks
		AllowOverride All
		RewriteEngine On
		RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
		RewriteRule ^(.*)$ app.php [QSA,L]
	</Directory>

	ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
	LogLevel warn
	CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

The tricky part is to make this vhost the default one: when running the apache2ctl -S command, your newly created vhost should appear as the first item of the list (default server):

root@my_hostname:~# apache2ctl -S
VirtualHost configuration:
wildcard NameVirtualHosts and _default_ servers:
*:80                   is a NameVirtualHost
         default server my_hostname (/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default:1)
         port 80 namevhost my_hostname (/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default:1)

Other services may appear as the first one: phpMyAdmin or munin may. Unfortunately, there's no perfect way to tell apache which vhost should be chosen as fallback, since their vhost configuration file usually lives in another directory. The easy solution would be to remove occurrences to these in apache conf files and to symlink those from the /etc/apache2/sites-available/ directory. Don't forget to a2ensite the latter.

Please remind that this vhost will be served when you'll try to visit localhost from your server. Some services may rely on this behavior, so we need to add some exceptions to our vhost. For instance, if you want to allow access to /server-status from localhost, edit your vhost accordingly:

<VirtualHost *:80>
	<Location /server-status>
	    SetHandler server-status
	    Order deny,allow
	    Deny from all
	    Allow from 127.0.0.1 localhost
	</Location>

	RewriteEngine On
	RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /server-status
	RewriteRule ^ - [L]

	DocumentRoot /var/www/Apache-Fallback-Page/web/
	<Directory "/var/www/Apache-Fallback-Page/web/">
		DirectoryIndex app.php
		Options -Indexes FollowSymLinks
		AllowOverride All
		RewriteEngine On
		RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/server-status$
		RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
		RewriteRule ^(.*)$ app.php [QSA,L]
	</Directory>
</VirtualHost>

You can use lynx (a command-line browser) to test your vhost configuration.