Question

I have a server that I am setting up to rewrite subdomains as get parameters

So,
subdomain.example.com/blog/test
would actually point to:
example.com/index.php?website=subdomain&request=blog/test

I have setup the domain with an A record with a value of *, and I have setup the server to ALIAS *.example.com to example.com. All of that is working.

In my .htaccess I have

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www. [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^([^/\.]+).example.com(.*)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?website=%1&request=%2 [L]

Here is a var_dump() of $_GET when i go to subdomain.example.com/blog/test

array(2) { ["website"]=> string(8) "subdomain" ["request"]=> string(0) "" } 

the subdomain is coming in perfectly in the website parameter, but the rest of the request is not there in the request parameter. Any Ideas? I really appreciate the help. Thanks in advance.

By the way if I use

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?website=%1&request=$1 [L]

Then I get index.php in the request parameter. If that tells you something additional.

AMENDMENT

Per John’s suggestion I tried the following

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www. [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^([^/\.]+).wescms.com(.*) [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?website=%1&request=%{REQUEST_URI} [NC,L]

If you go to subdomain.example.com/blog/test the REQUEST_URI comes back with index.php
I did a var_dump() of the $_SERVER variable, and in the REQUEST_URI it shows /blog/test, but its not making it through the RewriteRule.

If I use THE_REQUEST in the rewrite rule rather than REQUEST_URI, I get back what I need plus some extra bits but I would appreciate understanding more about why REQUEST_URI is not working as in my last example. Thanks.

Answer 1

Your second RewriteCond is matching against %{HTTP_HOST}, which only includes the hostname the of the request, not the “path” portion.

The requested resource (basically, the part of the URL after the hostname) is available as the %{REQUEST_URI} variable. In your situation, you could use the variable directly in your rule rather than trying to capture that data in a RewriteCond.