Question

I need to redirect some users, possibly to a subdomain, but I do not want them to know that they are in a subdomain. They should think they are in the main domain.
I believe this can be done with htaccess, but it is gibberish to me.

Can someone please throw me some bones?

Answer 1

When serving content from a different domain without redirecting the browser (thus changing the URL in the address bar) one of two things needs to happen. Either there is a file-path resolution to the other domain, or a reverse proxy must be set up (and it’s pretty easy to do if mod_proxy is loaded).

It looks like you have your subdomain inside the document root of your main domain, which means this option will be viable. So if you want to it so when someone puts this URL in their address bar, http://domain.com/page, they get served the content in http://sub.domain.com/another-page, you’d simply add these rules to the top of the htaccess file in the document root of your main domain (public_html):

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^page(.*)$ /subdomain_folder/another-page$1 [L]

Otherwise, the second option is to use mod_proxy:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^page(.*)$ http://sub.domain.com/another-page$1 [L,P]

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EDIT:

I want to redirect some users, depending on their ip (geographic location) to another subdomain. And yes public_html is the root

You can check against the IP via the %{REMOTE_ADDR} variable:

RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^123\.45\.67\.89$
RewriteCond !^/subdomain_folder
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /subdomain_folder/$1 [L]