Vultr & EasyEngine - access a dev site before DNS switching.

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martyyn

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#225544 23-Nov-2017 14:57

I've been playing with EE on Vultr in Sydney this week following guides by @michaelmurfy and @timmmay and I'm really liking the speed increase over my hosting in the US.

I would like to update and migrate a site before switching the DNS. I've edited my local hosts file to use the Vultr IP address rather than the DNS but as I have a couple of sites on the Vultr instance now it sends me to a different site.

Is there a way to specify which site I want to go to ?

jarledb

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#1906512 23-Nov-2017 15:30

You have to specify that in the setup on the server. If you are running multiple sites on a server, you are probably sharing the ip-address.

if you have added

site1.tld ip-address
site2.tld ip-address

Etc. and not seeing the sites, but another site instead - then you need to look at the web server setup.

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timmmay

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#1906544 23-Nov-2017 16:16

1.2.3.4 site.com is all I do in hosts. The requests hits the server and it knows how to server it by looking at the web server configuration. If you're seeing the wrong site it's web server config.

martyyn

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#1906547 23-Nov-2017 16:26

Yeah, that's what I'm trying to figure out. It's been a few years since I've played with stuff like this and that was all apache whereas I did this with nginx. The setup for each site was simple enough with EE and it's only now I want to get to one site with no DNS I'm having trouble.

The sites all appear to be created properly with the appropriate host files and links etc, but whilst the three other sites all have their DNS setup this one doesn't.

I thought I'd found it with having a listen 80 default server command in the sites-available file but that didn't work :(

marpada

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#1906548 23-Nov-2017 16:28

There are as well some browser extensions like https://www.requestly.in to add the proper Host header when accessing the IP address of the server, but if the hosts file trick is not working for you probably your webserver is misconfigured. When setting the vhost you probably want to add both the www and without www version.

outdoorsnz

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#1906555 23-Nov-2017 16:48

martyyn:

I've been playing with EE on Vultr in Sydney this week following guides by @michaelmurfy and @timmmay and I'm really liking the speed increase over my hosting in the US.

I would like to update and migrate a site before switching the DNS. I've edited my local hosts file to use the Vultr IP address rather than the DNS but as I have a couple of sites on the Vultr instance now it sends me to a different site.

Is there a way to specify which site I want to go to ?

After you edited the hosts file, did you flush your dns cache? You can double check that with a nslookup on the domain.

timmmay

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#1906558 23-Nov-2017 16:49

Post or pm you hosts and nginx config file. Change to example.com example1.com to anonymize. I'll look later on tonight.

martyyn

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#1906659 23-Nov-2017 17:50

I've now gone through a couple of 'guides' on the web and everything appears to be set up correctly. I've tried ipconfig /flushdns and have double checked the config and host files. They aren't complicated and I have others to check against but I appreciate the offer Tim.

If I disable the other sites I get an ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED error in Chrome. So I created another server and added two sites to it. The second one again errored but this time I was told the SSL certificate for site2.com did not correspond to the SSL certificate for the other (site1.com).

site2.com has an SSL cert on the existing site (which I want to leave alone) but I haven't created the dev site with --letsencrypt because the DNS doesn't point to it and I would expect it to fail. I wonder if that is the cause ?

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timmmay

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#1906688 23-Nov-2017 18:32

Get http working first

martyyn

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#1913844 6-Dec-2017 13:53

Forgot to update this with the solution.

Sadly it ended up in the 'I did a few things without testing and I dont know which one fixed it' bucket !!

May have been a caching issue or may have been the virtual hosts files on the VPS didn't include listen 80; (or whatever the syntax is) by default because that's the only thing I remember changing.

Either way, it's all good now :)

Loving the simplicity and speed of Vultr's VPS. Big thanks to @michaelmurfy and @timmmay for their user guides. I'm still finding things in Tim's to try !

jnimmo

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#1913852 6-Dec-2017 14:03

I've had a few issues with EasyEngine (on Vultr) around this recently too especially with SSL config, I think I was using redis caching on one of my WP sites and turning that off seemed to fix it

martyyn

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#1914849 7-Dec-2017 20:30

Hmm, spoke too soon.

I'm going to start from scratch tomorrow with a new server on Vultr and just add one piece at a time.

I've read so much about SSL, Cloudflare, Nginx, etc tonight my head is spinning !!

timmmay

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#1914850 7-Dec-2017 20:34

Ah it's easy enough once you get your head around it. I went from knowing about three Linux commands to writing that tutorial in the space of about three months, building Nginx from source, setting up all kinds of things like fail2ban updating the CloudFlare firewall to ban. Still nowhere near an expert though.

martyyn

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#1914855 7-Dec-2017 20:39

Don't get me wrong I've loved every minute of the time I've put into it so far. But there is just so much information on the web you don't know what to read half the time.

I bet once I have it sorted out will be easy !