Question

Trying to implement subdomains with htaccess.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteBase /

    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^([a-z0-9]+)\.domain.com(.*)$
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/index.php?/public_site/main/%1/$1 [L]
</IfModule>

when i enter ahser.domain.com the browser URL is changing. is there a htaccess option to not let this happen when absolute URLs is used in RewriteRule?

Answer 1

Don’t rewrite to a full URL with domain in it. That generates a redirect since it’s going to a different website! You could put microsoft.com there; so how would it work without redirecting?

What you have to do is make sure that the web pages work under the original domain. So when the client asks for myname.domain.com/... how about rewriting that to myname.domain.com/index.php?public_site/main/myname/.... Keep the domain the same. The index.php? can be made to work in any of those domains. For instance, even this could work:

http://OTHER.domain.com/index.php?public_site/main/MYNAME/...

I.e. set it up so it doesn’t matter which virtual host accesses that path.

Once you have that, the rewrite can then just do:

# will not trigger redirect
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php?/public_site/main/%1/$1 [L]

You have to be careful not to introduce a loop since you’re now redirecting a URL to a longer URL which matches the same rewrite rulethe same domain. You need an additional RewriteCond not to apply this rewrite if the URL already starts with /index.php?public_site/.