Question

On my site, users have public profiles that can be accessed via http://mysite.com/vanity_url. I want to allow users to point their own domains to their profile page on my site. Just like Bandcamp does.

My Profile model has these two fields to deal with this: vanity_url, which is the normal username type of field; and a new custom_domain which is their own domains’ name, eg, example.com.

This is what I have done so far, but I’m afraid it might not be the most elegant, safe, and efficient way to do it.

First, I made sure Apache’s DocumentRoot is set to my app’s webroot directory, so I can tell users to point their DNS to my site’s IP.

Now, this is how the routing rules on my routes.php look like:

if (preg_match('/mysite\.com\.?$/', $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'])){
    // Normal routes when visitors go to my domain
    Router::connect('/', array('controller' => 'pages', 'action' => 'display', 'home'));
    Router::connect('/pages/**', array('controller' => 'pages', 'action' => 'display'));

    // Move all other actions to a separate '/app/' area
    Router::connect('/app/:controller/:action/**');
    Router::connect('/app/:controller/**');

    // Handle profile URLs
    Router::connect('/:profile/**', 
        array('controller' => 'profiles', 'action' => 'view'), 
        array('pass' => array('profile'), 'profile' => '[0-9a-zA-Z\-\_]+')
    );
}
else{
    // If visitors come via a URL different to mysite.com, I let 
    // the ProfilesController deal with it passing the current SERVER_NAME 
    // as a param to the 'view' action
    Router::connect('/', array(
        'controller' => 'profiles', 
        'action' => 'view', 
        $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'], // 'url' param
        true // 'customDomain' param
    ));
    Router::redirect('/*', 'http://mysite.com');
}

And this is how the view action on the ProfilesController looks like:

public function view($url = null, $customDomain = false) {
    if ($url){
        // Find the profile by its vanity_url or its custom_domain
        $findOptions = array(
            'conditions' => $customDomain? 
                array('custom_domain' => $url) : 
                array('vanity_url' => $url) 
        );
        if ($profile = $this->Profile->find('first', $findOptions)) {
            $this->set('profile', $profile);
        }
    }
    else throw new NotFoundException(__('Invalid profile'));
}

What problems could I face with this approach?

Also, does anyone know why Bandcamp asks users to create a CNAME instead of an A record to set up a subdomain? Am I missing something I should consider here?

Edit Somebody helped me figure that last bit out: It seems you can’t easily use an CNAME record to point a naked domain to another. The main question is still open.

Answer 1

I guess there’s no better way 😛