Question

What I am trying to do is use a subdomain for a special mobile version of my ZF application. Ideally it would map to a specific controller like the example below, but at this point I’m willing to try any method that works:

Ex. m.domain.com/action would route to the “mobile” controller and whatever action is specified.

I found a number of similar questions here and elsewhere on the Google but I get the feeling I am missing something obvious because no matter what route I set up it’s just being ignored. I suspect it has something to do with htaccess but could be wrong there.

Here is the route I currently have in my bootstrap file (but I have tried a number of different patters here). Right now I’m just trying to get it to show the plain index for simplicity:

$hostRoute = new Zend_Controller_Router_Route_Hostname(':subdomain.domain.com', 
        array(
            'controller' => 'index',
            'action' => 'index'
            )
    );
$plainPathRoute = new Zend_Controller_Router_Route(':controller/:action/*',     
    array('controller' => 'index', 'action' => 'index'));
$controller->getRouter()->addRoute('mobile', $hostRoute->chain($plainPathRoute));

And my htaccess has:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -s [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -l [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule ^.*$ - [NC,L]
RewriteRule ^.*$ index.php [NC,L]

Now there are 2 methods I have been trying out here because I have been so frustrated.

1. Create the subdomain “m” inside of my hosting account
2. Subdomain “app” does not exist on my web hosting account

For method 1, it just goes to the generic index.html file that is in domain.com/m/. Method 2 tells me the page doesn’t exist.

I’m really hoping there is something obvious here that I’m missing. Like I mentioned above, I’m not picky about how exactly this gets executed, so long as I can have a subdomain point to a specific controller. It’s going to be a very simplified version of the site so I don’t really need to do anything complex.

Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

First of all, you need to configure your virtual host to handle multiple domains:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName example.com
    ServerAlias www.example.com
    ServerAlias m.example.com
    ServerAlias www.m.example.com
    ...

You may also do this by adding new subdomain pointing to your site root, via your hosting panel options.

Then you may create a route chain, as in your example, or handle the switch yourself, e.g. in the controller plugin:

$host = strtolower($request->getServer('HTTP_HOST'));
if ('m.' === substr($host, 0, 2) || 'www.m.' === substr($host, 0, 6)) {
    $themes->setTheme('m');
    $userSession->theme = 'm';
    ...