Question

Does Grails know anything about sub-domains (i.e. subdomain.domain.com) ? I don’t see it discussed in the manual. Is this purely an app server/web server issue? Can be tied into grails controllers, either statically or dynamically?

Answer 1

It does not matter which host is accessed for a java web application.

1. Supposing you have multiple clients separated on one host, e.g. customer1.yourhost.com, customer2.yourhost.com, etc. and all clients will have same functionalities.

   In the simplest case I propse, that you just use write a filter, which will always put some request variable, like this:

   def filters = {
       all(controller:'*', action:'*') {
           before = {
               if (request.serverName.contains(".")) {
                   def clientName = 
                     request.serverName.substring(0, request.serverName.indexOf("."))
   
                   request.currentClient = Client.findByClientName(clientName) // e.g.
               }
           }
       }
   }
   

   Then at any place you can check request.currentClient for the current accessed subdomain.

   However if it gets more complicated have a look at some multi-tenant plugins for grails.

2. If you want to have different functionalities for each subdomain e.g. help.yourhost.com and http://www.yourhost.com, I would propose that you write independent grails applications. You then setup a NGINX server to redirect those requests to the appropriate application running on your application server.