mod_rewrite fo a subdomain

[uprightdog]

Here's what I want to happen:
When a user connects to any subdomain (mysubdomain1.mydomain.com, mysubdomain2.mydomain.com etc) they should see the contents of www.mydomain.com/content. However, the address bar should still show mysubdomain1.mydomain.com.

Is this possible with mod_rewrite?

[Ron]

Yes, but I'm not sure you'd want to do it that way, unless I'm mis-understanding your needs.

When you say "/content" by that do you mean your main index page, then any relative links from that?

If so, you could also ask support to add a DNS wilcard for not-specifically-listed subdomains, that would cause *.domain.com to resolve to the same place, and whatever they had in the url would remain.


A word of caution might be in order: The search engine world (ie Google) won't like seeing the same content on different subdomains, and will penalize most, all, or all-but-one of them.

Good luck!

[uprightdog]

Yes, but I'm not sure you'd want to do it that way, unless I'm mis-understanding your needs.

I wouldn't?

When you say "/content" by that do you mean your main index page, then any relative links from that?

Yes.

A word of caution might be in order: The search engine world (ie Google) won't like seeing the same content on different subdomains, and will penalize most, all, or all-but-one of them.

Well, each subdomain's content will differ slightly, as PHP will pull some unique content from the DB according to the subdomain used. At least, that's the plan.

[Ron]

Cool. I think your best bet might be to go the wildcard route, unless you have a limited number of subdomains for which you want to do this.

Otherwise, there are about 100 ways to accomplish what you want to do.

You could have your main code in a common location, and soft link to the code. Each subdomain's index.php would just be a link to the common code. You could have a php include() in each subdomain's index.php file that would just include the same code in each case.

You could set up .htaccess in each subdomain (or if you're lucky in your public_html directory and have it inherited to each subdomain, but I've found that not to be 100% relaiable and frequently caused me fits) That would internally redirect to a php program... but working from within a subdomain structure, now you're going to be mucking around with resetting the rewrite base, and I think making things incredibly complicated, when a simple wildcarding would do just fine for your purposes.

If you really really want to set up a subdomain for each different term, perhaps a note to support to point the subdomain to your www directory would suffice for your purposes, too.

Good luck!

[Vin DSL]

When a user connects to any subdomain (mysubdomain1.mydomain.com, mysubdomain2.mydomain.com etc) they should see the contents of www.mydomain.com/content. However, the address bar should still show mysubdomain1.mydomain.com.

Is this possible with mod_rewrite?

This is how I do it...

#RedirectMatch multiple subdomains (domain.com/subdomain -> subdomain.domain.com) - VinDSL
RedirectMatch 301 /(alpha|beta|civic|download|pilot|info)/(.*)$ http://$1.lenon.com/$2

EDIT: I suppose I should supply some examples...

• http://www.lenon.com/alpha
• http://www.lenon.com/alpha/index.php
• http://www.lenon.com/beta
• http://www.lenon.com/beta/index.php
• http://www.lenon.com/civic
• http://www.lenon.com/civic/index.htm
• http://www.lenon.com/info
• http://www.lenon.com/info/index.php
• http://www.lenon.com/pilot
• http://www.lenon.com/pilot/index.php

[Ron]

I don't think that's the issue, vin....

He's not looking to direct domain.com/subd to subd.domain.com
He's looking to internally rewrite subd.domain.com to www.domain.com

[Vin DSL]

I don't think that's the issue, vin....

He's not looking to direct domain.com/subd to subd.domain.com
He's looking to internally rewrite subd.domain.com to www.domain.com

Ah! Okay...

In that case, yes, that's possible, but you better have a pretty good knowledge of mod_rewrite. That sort of stuff is mind-boggling, even for me. I know mod_rewrite backwards, forwards, and upside down, but it still gives me a headache, literally...

Basically, what you need to do is configure .htaccess to do the rewrites, then call them up in your header. Sounds simple enough, but it probably took me a year to figure this out.

[Vin DSL]

I don't think that's the issue, vin....

He's not looking to direct domain.com/subd to subd.domain.com
He's looking to internally rewrite subd.domain.com to www.domain.com

You know, I was just thinking...

If all the links to content on the subs are written using relative links (ahem), as they properly should be, wouldn't the redirect[s] take care of his problem?

Click on some stuff in the examples I provided. They retain the correct name structure in the addy bar, right? Isn't this what he's talking about?

[Ron]

All he needs is to have support wildcard his domain to his www folder, then use php to determine which subdomain was requested.

Something like

<?php
// Detect the subdomain and take action based upon it
// Ron, October 08, 2005
// Note you must substitue your domain name in lower case in this code example.

$domainstart = strpos(strtolower($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']),".mydomain.com");

if ($domainstart === false)
{
// no ".mydomain.com" found, so there is no subdomain!
// do whatever you want with no special subdomain
}
else
{
   $subdomain = substr($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'],0,$domainstart);
   switch ($subdomain)
   {
   case "www":
      echo "got your www here<br>";
      break;
   case "highvaluekeyword":
      echo "spam me now, I'm a highvaluekeyword<br>";
      break;
   default:    // Any subdomain name you weren't expecting
      echo "I'm off to google this";
      break;
   }
}
?>

No rewriting, either internal or external, required.
There ya go. Have a blast.

[Ron]

Naaaah vin, your stuff works well for what you're doing, but it's not what I get out of his request....


He wants to have people going to test.lenon.com and foo.lenon.com to be pointed to the content located at www.lenon.com but still see the different subdomains in the addy bar.

There are a hundred ways to do this, I think the easiest is as coded.

[jason]

I agree with Ron. Just direct *anything*.domain.com to public_html using a DNS wildcard and use the HTTP_HOST variable to figure out what content to display. Easy to code, easy to maintain, and it requires no "unusual" server overhead--just simple HTTP requests and basic scripting.

--Jason

[Ron]

I would like to point out that with wildcarding, existing specific subdomains and future specific subdomains will all properly resolve to the proper subdomain subdirectory as well.

When I first started with Aletia (I think) they used to wildcard automatically... I think when Jag took over they dropped that. Or it could have been when I moved from another provider to Aletia that it was dropped.

Anyway, specific subdomains worked fine with wildcarding in place.

[the_ancient]

I seem to think Jag did the wildcards automatically at one time, but I could be wrong on that....

I wonder why they dont anyway?

[Ron]

I actually ran into a problem with it a bunch of years ago.

Someone had a typo in my URL on their page.

The typo was http://%0a%0dwww.domain.com . In other words, there was a line fieed/carriage erturn embedded in my url.

Google picked it up, and that became the primary url for my site in their index. Fortunately, I was able to construct a search and found the site where the error was started (it was a guestbook of a friend's site!) and I was able to get the friend to remove the link. It took about 6 months to get straightened away.

Google suggested that it was a bad idea to have a wildcarded domain, but I don't recall if they gave any other answers. I think I might have even discussed it on the net elsewhere (here?), but it was sooo long ago....

[Vin DSL]

I actually ran into a problem with it a bunch of years ago.

Someone had a typo in my URL on their page.

The typo was http://%0a%0dwww.domain.com...

I get stuff like that every so often. Here's how I handle it (using your example)...

#Deny particularly nasty referers - VinDSL
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http://%0a%0dwww.domain.com" bad_ref=yes   [NC]
RewriteCond %{ENV:bad_ref} ^yes$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^(.*)$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ %1                                               [R=301,L]

After a while, they'll go away...