Question

I am trying to develop an asp.net site with multiple subdomains. I am new to web sites in general, and asp.net in particular. However, it seems that wildcard subdomains are properly setup with a combination of dns entries and web server configuration – which isn’t going to happen on my development machine. Therefore I’m manually inserting entries in my windows hosts file:

127.0.0.1  localhost
127.0.0.1  abc.localhost
127.0.0.1  xyz.localhost

However, when I try to interrogate the Request.Url property there is no subdomain to be seen. For example, if I hit http://abc.localhost:1660/ in the browser I get http://localhost:1660/ from Request.Uri.ToString(); the abc is just gone?!

I don’t know why the hosts file works like this, but is there any other method I can use to get subdomains into my local web application? Thank you all.

Note that I’m only using the built-in asp.net development server rather than a full iis server. (I can’t get access to a full IIS this weekend, but I would still like to know if that would help.)

Answer 1

You can get the requested domain with Subdomain intact by using “Request.Headers[“HOST”]“. Here’s a simple method that returns the Subdomain of the current request. This method also assumes that you have a “.COM”, “.NET”, etc. after the domain just like the real web. So you’ll want to change your HOSTS file to include “localhost.com”, “abc.localhost.com”, etc.

public string subdomain()
{
    string host = Request.Headers["HOST"];
    if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(host))
    {
        var parts = host.Split('.');
        if (parts.Length > 2)
        {
            return parts[0];
        }
    }
    return string.Empty;
}

I was searching on this very thing and here’s an article that is what actually helped me figure this out:
https://web.archive.org/web/20090813174916/http://blogs.securancy.com/post/ASPNET-MVC-Subdomain-Routing.aspx