Question

I have a subdomain m.example.com that I want to point to the same location as example.com/mobile running on an apache2/django1.3 installation.

example.com is the landing page, and I have the urls.py configured such that urls that match /^mobile$/ will be served the mobile version of the page. I looked into <VirtualHost>, but I think it requires a physical location for me to point m.example.com at and with the django urls there is no physical location except for the root of the project directory.

I am unsure if the configuration change is made on the apache side or the django side.

I’ve also looked into the mod_rewrite module for Apache, but I would prefer if I didnt have to redirect m.example.com to example.com/mobile

Answer 1

I will avoid apache redirections, just using Middlewares.

It’s common to use a middleware to get a context variable that gives the current domain that the user is using.

From: http://djangosnippets.org/snippets/1119/

class SubdomainMiddleware:
    """ Make the subdomain publicly available to classes """

    def process_request(self, request):
        domain_parts = request.get_host().split('.')
        if (len(domain_parts) > 2):
            subdomain = domain_parts[0]
            if (subdomain.lower() == 'www'):
                subdomain = None
            domain = '.'.join(domain_parts[1:])
        else:
            subdomain = None
            domain = request.get_host()

        request.subdomain = subdomain
        request.domain = domain

on your view, can use the subdomain and domain value to properly switch content and logic.

def homepage(request):
    if request.subdomain == 'm':
         return movil_homepage(request)
    else:
         return default_homepage(request)

You can even get decorators, and map all the views on your website.

Even more common, it’s just to build a second project, that use the same database. It’s up to you.