I was setting up a new Magento 2 installation for a project.  It’s the first time I’ve done it from scratch for a long time.

I setup the code, vhost, host file rewrite to my local vm, etc.  Went to http://mydomain.local/ and got redirected to http://mydomain.local/setup with a message saying “Too many redirects.”

It turns out that if you setup your vhost the right way and point to {magento-root}/pub the web installer doesn’t work.

The fix was to point the vhost to {magento-root}, run the web installer then change the vhost root back to {magento-root}/pub.

In apache it looked like this for the install:

<VirtualHost *:80>
        ServerName mysite.local
        DocumentRoot /var/www/mysite/httpdocs
        <Directory "/var/www/mysite/httpdocs">
                Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
                AllowOverride All
                Allow from all
                Require all granted
        </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Then I changed it back to this for the development of the site:

<VirtualHost *:80>
        ServerName mysite.local
        DocumentRoot /var/www/mysite/httpdocs/pub
        <Directory "/var/www/mysite/httpdocs/pub">
                Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
                AllowOverride All
                Allow from all
                Require all granted
        </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Obviously the production site will have a lot more apache directives in it, or better yet, use Nginx and php-fpm with SSL directives, etc.  But for development on a local Apache server, this works great.