Hi,
I’ve got a requirement which requires my site to accept all subdomains
e.g. sub1.domain.com, sub2.domain.com, sub3.domain.com etc and handle
them accordingly. I’m currently investigating the options for dealing
with this.
Would it be possible to this with routes or would I need to rewrite
the urls before it gets to rails? e.g. it would need to rewrite
sub1.domain.com → domain.com/x/y/sub1
The server would be running Apache and I believe i would be able to
rewrite it there but 1st prize if I can do it with routes.
I’m very new to Rails, loving every minute btw, but a bit stuck on
this so any pointers would really be appreciated.
Cheers,
Armand
Armand du Plessis wrote:
The server would be running Apache and I believe i would be able to
rewrite it there but 1st prize if I can do it with routes.
I’m very new to Rails, loving every minute btw, but a bit stuck on
this so any pointers would really be appreciated.
You could either route all subdomains to your Rails application and let
the application decide what to do based on the subdomain or you could do
some apache rewrite magic like you suggest. Assuming subdomains of the
form you mentioned above the subdomain can be extracted in the
controller simply with “request.subdomains[0]”.
–
Cheers,
On 7/26/07, Jacob A. [email protected] wrote:
Would it be possible to this with routes or would I need to rewrite
the application decide what to do based on the subdomain or you could do
some apache rewrite magic like you suggest. Assuming subdomains of the
form you mentioned above the subdomain can be extracted in the
controller simply with " request.subdomains[0]".
–
Cheers,
Thanks Jacob. If I want to keep the code clean without checking
subdomains
everywhere i think I’ll have to look at the apache rewriting then. Was
kinda
hoping I could skip that part and that there’s some subdomain magic in
the
routes configuration that I was missing 
Cheers,
Armand
PS. I see the Groovy project has a nice feature in their routes port
that
sounds promising but unfortunately doesn’t help me at all.
http://routes.groovie.org/manual.html#sub-domain-support
On 26 Jul 2007, at 23:07, Armand du Plessis wrote:
Thanks Jacob. If I want to keep the code clean without checking
subdomains everywhere i think I’ll have to look at the apache
rewriting then. Was kinda hoping I could skip that part and that
there’s some subdomain magic in the routes configuration that I was
missing
Actually, that’s not what Jacob means.
It’s quite simple actually: if you want to use one application with
one database, but identify customer accounts with a subdomain, you
have to pass the subdomain to Rails and let it either store the
company in a session or use an application-wide before_filter to look
up the subdomain. Using a subdomain shifts the emphasis from your
website url to the customer, he gets the feeling it’s his private
space (or at least that’s how i like to look at it) and it reads a
lot better.
You could use Apache rewrite to rewrite the url
mycustomer.mydomain.com to mydomain.com/mycustomer, but it doesn’t
make a difference if you’re search for the customer in the database
anyway.
There are two plugins I’ve used in the past for subdomain based
routing: account_domain and request_routing, both work fine. Don’t
forget to add ServerAlias *.mydomain.com in your virtual host
definition as well as add the wildcard domain to your dns.
Apache rewrites can be very useful, e.g. if you want to run a
separate mongrel for some or all customers. It has quite a few other
uses too, but these are out of the scope of this thread.
Best regards
Peter De Berdt
On 7/26/07, Peter De Berdt [email protected] wrote:
Actually, that’s not what Jacob means.
for the customer in the database anyway.
Best regards
Peter De Berdt
Thanks both of you. I’m a little slow but now I understand I became
so
fixated on getting the urls rewritten I wasn’t “getting” the easy
solution.
I think I’ll use the request_routing plugin’s conditions to cleanly
seperate
between normal requests and subdomain requests and then just use the
request.subdomain as you guys suggested to do the lookup where
subdomains
are involved. doh!
Thanks again.
Armand