By default when you connect to your wiki farm you will go to the main wiki. To be able to access other wikis, XWiki supports two modes.

• The domain name based wiki access
• The URL path based wiki access

The domain name based wiki access

In virtual mode you can access any wiki by the domain name/alias registered in its descriptor with the field server ("Alias" in the UI).

For example if the url is http://wikiname.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Space/Page XWiki will try to find "wikiname.xwiki.org" as a value of the server field in the objects of class XWiki.XWikiServerClass. Then it extracts the last part of the page name to get the wiki identifier: in this case it finds XWiki.XWikiServerWikiname and extracts "wikiname" as the wiki identifier to set the database to query on.

If no descriptor can be found:

• if the host is an IP (127.0.0.1, 85.65.12.36, etc.) XWiki selects the main wiki
• else, if the first part of the host name (what is before the first point) is "www" XWiki selects the main wiki
• else, if the first part of the host name matches a wiki identifier XWiki selects that wiki

If after all no wiki has been found, then XWiki redirects to the URL configured in the property xwiki.virtual.redirect of xwiki.cfg.

So to be able to access your wiki you need to configure your DNS or modify hosts file in your operating system (see Hosts file documentation on Wikipedia for details).

The URL path based wiki access

When this mode is enabled you can access a wiki using an url like: http://host/xwiki/wiki/wikialias/view/Space/Page.
The two parts of /wiki/wikialias mean:

• wiki: this is used by XWiki to identify the URL as a URL path based multiwiki access. You can configure it in xwiki.cfg with the property xwiki.virtual.usepath.servletpath.

  Don't forget to set the xwiki.authentication.logoutpage property accordingly. Change the "wiki" part in the property value for the right alias.

• wikialias: this is used by XWiki to find the wiki descriptor
  • first it tries to match wikialias with the descriptors 
  • if it can't find the descriptor this way it tries to match the wiki descriptor using wikialias as the wiki identifier. This means looking whether the XWiki.XWikiServerWikialias document exists and contains an object of the XWiki.XWikiServerClass class

If no /wiki/wikialias path is found in the URL then XWiki defaults to the domain-based algorithm.