Possible to strip incoming URL of sub domain and execute script?

[msaz87]

Hey all,

 

So the general idea with what I'm looking to do is find a method to take an inbound URL that includes a subdomain, strip out just the sub, then execute something off of it. The idea is to have each client on the site able to say to their customers "go to example.site.com" -- without actually creating a subdomain for each.

 

They would input that URL and (here's where I'm unsure) either the 404 or whatever strips out "example" then I have a script that checks the DB for whether there is a client by that name and if so, redirects them to site.com/?client=example or whatever.

 

Hopefully that makes sense... any advice is greatly appreciated. Thanks!

[jd307]

You will probably need to use .htaccess to be able to do what you are asking for.

 

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.yourwebsite.com
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ([^.]+)\.yourwebsite.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /path_to_your_site/httpdocs/work_out.php?url=%1

 

This *should* grab any subdomain (e.g. mysubdomain.yoruwebsite.com) and redirect to a page called work_out.php (e.g. www.yourwebsite.com/work_out.php?url= ***subdomain***).  This way you can write a PHP script on the work_out.php page which redirects the user to www.yourwebsite.com/subdomain... for example.

 

BUT...

 

As your question poses, I suspect you are more interested in having subdomains that STAY that way... for example a user would navigate to: mysubdomain.yourwebsite.com.  While at that site links would be: mysubdomain.yourwebsite.com/downloads, etc. so they consistently stay with the subdomain instead of to a folder based on the main domain... (I hope this makes sense cuz I'm confusing myself haha).

 

In which case...

 

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?domain\.com
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ([a-z0-9-]+)/? http://$1.domain.com [R=301,NC,L]

 

This I believe should do roughly what you want, but of course you need to replace "domain.com" with your domain in both occurances.

 

Disclaimer:  I have had similar interests with this kind of thing, though I have not done it yet... so when I found this post I did a bit of research into this and these are the .htaccess methods that I found that "claim" to do what you want.  I have not tested them and I do not fully understand the code for .htaccess therefore I am only going by what I have read to be true and cannot really confirm what this does by reading it.

[msaz87]

Thanks for the reply, jd -- it makes sense .htaccess might be the only way to accomplish this. I'll give it a go and see how it works...

 

Thanks again