Disable & remove virtual host website entry in Apache

You can list the currently enabled websites if you want to check the name:


$ ls /etc/apache2/sites-enabled
000-default.conf my-website.conf


Disable virtual host entry
Let’s assume we’d like to disable my-website.conf. To disable this virtual hosts entry, we issue the following command to Apache (note the exclusion of the .conf extension from the virtual host name):

$ sudo a2dissite my-website

You can confirm this has disabled the website by checking that the site is no longer listed in the enabled sites directory:

$ ls /etc/apache2/sites-enabled
000-default.conf

You’ll then need to reload Apache for the changes to take effect:

$ sudo service apache2 reload

Remove virtual host entry

Wanna go the whole nine yards?

If you no longer need the virtual host configuration file, remove that too. First double check what it’s called by listing out the available websites:

$ ls /etc/apache2/sites-available
000-default.conf my-website.conf

Note that this is a different location to /etc/apache2/sites-enabled, from earlier.

Remove the config file you no longer need:

$ rm /etc/apache2/sites-available/my-website.conf

You may also want to backup then remove any website files residing in the /var/www directory, for example:

$ cd /var/www
$ tar czf my-website.tar.gz my-website
$ rm -r my-website

Finish up by copying the backup to somewhere safe and then go ahead and delete it from the server to free up some space.