Question

I was recently tasked with segregating my existing Rails 3 application into a standard and premium version. The premium version will have all the existing functionality with the addtion of a new layout, and new functionality. Ideally I want premuim users to access this site byway of prefixing the current url with a subdomain, e.g, “premium.somesite.com”/ The standard version of the website I don’t want to change and is still accessible by the default url.

If possible I would like to simply add some logic to exiting views and controller to determine how the request is treated on whether or not a subdomain is being used .

I tried following the Railcast subdomains in rails 3, however he’s using subdomains in context of a blog model and database attributes where as I wanted mine to be application-wide. Is this even possible with subdomains? How can I get started?

---

What I’ve tried:

Added an additional VirtualHost to my apache httpd.conf file used by passenger:

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName premium.mydomain.com
  DocumentRoot /somewhere/../myapp
  <Directory /somewhere/public>
    Allow from all
    Options -Multiviews
  </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Added the following to my routes.rb

class PremiumSubdomain
  def self.matches?(request)
    request.subdomain == "premium"
  end
end

MyApp::Application.routes.draw do    
  constraints(PremiumSubdomain) do    
    #all of my routes...    
  end    
end

What happens:

Trying to navigate to my site with the premium subdomain results in a domain not found, adding the constraint to my route.rb prevents the rest of the application from rendering anything on my default url.

Answer 1

So it turned out that while I did have everything configured on apache appropriately we were using a third-party for our DNS server so it was simply a matter of adding a record for our sub-domain and everything else was peachy.