Question

I have a site that has an admin page (eg admin.php) that is normally accessed via mydomain.com/admin.php

What I was hoping to be able to do is to use htaccess to map
“admin.mydomain.com” to “mydomain.com/admin.php” in such a way that the user would never know that it was a ‘file’.

That is, if someone externally tried to access “mydomain.com/admin.php”, I want it to 404.

Now, for the even hard part: the admin.php page will want to serve links as “/admin.php?param=value”, etc and so I’d need to look at the referrer (???) to let this work as expected.

can htaccess do this? Any idea on where to start?

Answer 1

If you have set up a record for admin.mydomain.com with the same IP Address as mydomain.com as well as the same DocumentRoot,

Then this can be done like this in your .htaccess:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{ENV:REDIRECT_STATUS} 200
RewriteRule ^ - [L]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(admin\.) [NC]
RewriteRule ^ %1php [L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} admin\.php$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^ - [R=404,L]