This isn't magic, though! Apache can't help you if the DNS isn't setup to find your subdomain. That is, you need DNS set up to forward your subdomain to your machine (e.g., *.mydomain.com => mydomain.com or something).
If you're on a development box, this can be complicated. You either have to get your DNS admin to add the forwarding (if you're in a big corporate network, this can be problematic) or you have to create your own LAN-local DNS server (using bind9 or somesuch...omg).
This is way too much trouble if you just want to try some stuff out! Isn't there a way to simulate accessing a subdomain?
Actually, yes.
If you think about it: how does Apache even know when you're hitting a subdomain? When you tell your browser to go to a URL, it's just hitting an IP address in the end (subdomain or not). How is this information passed on?
It turns out its passed in through the "Host" HTTP header.
If there were some way to hack the "Host" header, we could access the ordinary URL but have the "Host" header be the subdomain, in which case Apache should respond with the subdomain's website.
As it happens, there's a great little Firefox addon called, appropriately enough, Modify Headers. Using it we can edit, add, or remove any HTTP headers that Firefox will send to the webserver.
For example, I can modify the "Host" header to be "subdomain.mydomain.com" like so:
then in Firefox I can go to the URL "mydomain.com" and apache will give me the website for "subdomain.mydomain.com". Woot!
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