I'm pretty new to Drupal. I've been Googling and searching Drupal.org trying to get a multi-site installation going.
So far I have a main Drupal (D7) installation at public_html, which has it's own domain (call it example1.com). This site is working fine.
I also have public_html/sites/example2.com with parked domain example2.com, which installed fine and works great.
Now I have a third site, whose domain is going to be example3.com, but I'm in development with that site, so prefer not to use the domain just yet.
I would like the file structure to be public_html/sites/example3.com and have a subdomain alias pointing example3.example1.com to public_html/sites/example3.com while I'm in dev, and then switch to the actual domain when I'm ready.
Do I have to use symlinks, or can I use the sites/sites.php to create an alias? I'm new to subdomains in general. Do I need to set up the example3.example1.com in cPanel or anything? How would I set this up?
I'm trying to use sites.php for this. I have "$sites['example3.example1.com'] = 'example3.com';" in sites.php. I have a clean settings.php in sites/example3.com. I've got that folder, its setting.php, and its files folder set to 777 for permissions. I try to go to example3.example1.com or example3.example1.com/install.php but this doesn't seem to be working. My browser(s) cannot find the site.