Question

I’m in the process of splitting resources across domains. I’ve read a few different ways on how to handle this. From what I’ve read the correct way to handle is to use absolute paths versus relative. If this is true, how would I handle this as I push my local development live? The domains won’t match from local to live.

The base_url allows for a single domain only as far as I’ve read. Should I create an asset path helper and autoload that? Or, is there something I’m missing here?

http://www.example.com would operate normally.
http://images.example.com/assets would point to my asset folder that exists in the root.

Answer 1

After further research this is the way I solved my problem. Thanks to the Codeigniter forum for helping me get to this solution. Create a switch that checks which stage of development the site is in and set the base_url and asset_url config accordingly.

switch(ENVIRONMENT)  //set in index.php
{
  case 'development':
    $config['base_url'] = 'http://localhost/';
    $config['asset_url'] = 'http://localhost/assets/';
    break;
  case 'production':
    $config['base_url'] = 'http://yoursite.com/';
    $config['asset_url'] = 'http://assets.yoursite.com/';
    break;
}

Then just extend the url_helper and create a function to get the asset_url

if ( ! function_exists('asset_url'))
{
    function asset_url($uri = '')
    {
        $CI =& get_instance();
        return $CI->config->item('asset_url') . ltrim($path, '/');
    }
}