Question

I have been struggling with this problem on hostgator shared hosting server for the past 3 hours. This is the problem in the simplest.

This is the mapping i want to happen:
subdomain.domain.com –> http://www.domain.com/test.php?user=subdomain

but for some reason whenever i enter “subdomain.domain.com” the redirection doesn’t happen and even the URL doesn’t change in my browser. And I see test.php file listed on loaded page (because The only files i have on server are .htaccess and test.php).

This is the .htacess code

     <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
            RewriteEngine On
            RewriteBase /

            <IfModule mod_proxy.c>
                    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www. [NC]
                    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^([a-z0-9]+).domain.com(.*)$ [NC]
                    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/test.php?user=$1$2 [P,L]
            </IfModule>

            <IfModule !mod_proxy.c>
                    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www. [NC]
                    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^([a-z0-9]+).domain.com(.*)$ [NC]
                    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/test.php?user=$1$2 [R=301,L]
            </IfModule>
    </IfModule>

and this is the test.php code

<?php echo $_GET['user']; ?>

does anyone know what the issue here is? the support was not helpful to me. i think there is something wrong with the server configuration.

Answer 1

RewriteCond backreferences use a percent, not dollar sign! %1 not $1.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www. [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^([a-z0-9]+).domain.com(.*)$ [NC]
                          ^ %1                  ^ %2
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/test.php?user=$1$2 [R=301,L]
             ^$1                                       ^^^^ oops

$1 means pull something from the regex on the left; %1 means pull it from the RewriteCond. You may be sticking the whole match as the user part, assuming the rewriter doesn’t choke on the fact that $2 is a dangling backreference.