I am currently hosting the contents of a site with ProviderA. I have a domain registered with ProviderB. I want users to access the contents (www.providerA.com/sub/content) by visiting www.providerB.com. A domain forward is easy enough and works as intended, however, unless I embed the site in a frame (which is a big no-no), the actual URL reads www.providerA.com/sub/content despite the user inputting www.providerB.com.
I really need a solution for this. A domain masking without the use of a frame. I'm sure this has been done before. An .htaccess domain rewrite?
Your help would be hugely appreciated! I'm going nuts trying to find a solution.
For Apache
Usual way: setup mod_proxy. The apache on providerB becomes a client to providerA's apache. It gets the content and sends it back to the client.
But looks like you only have .htaccess. So no proxy, you need full configuration access for that.
So you cannot, see: How to set up proxy in .htaccess
If you have PHP on providerB
Setup a proxy written in PHP. All requests to providerB are intercepted by that PHP proxy. It gets the content from providerA and sends it back. So it does the same thing as the Apache module. However, depending on the quality of the implementation, it might fail on some requests, types, sizes, timeouts, ...
Search for "php proxy" on the web, you will see a couple available on GitHub and others. YMMV as to how difficult it is to setup, and the reliability.
No PHP but some other server side language
Obviously that could be done in another language, I checked PHP because that is what I use the most.
The best solution would be to transfer the content to providerB :-)
Related
I am currently migrating my website from Apache to nginx, but my .htaccess file is not working. My website is inside the /usr/share/nginx/html/mywebsite folder. How can I use .htaccess in my nginx server?
This is my .htaccess file:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule video/watch/([a-zA-Z0-9_#$*-]+)/?$ "videos-single.php?id=$1" [NC]
Nginx doesn't support .htaccess (see here: "You can’t do this. You shouldn’t. If you need .htaccess, you’re probably doing it wrong.").
You've two choices (as I know):
import your .htaccess to nginx.conf (maybe the htaccess to nginx converter helps you)
use authd-htpasswd (I didn't try it)
Disclosure: I am the author of htaccess for nginx, which is now open source software.
Over the past years, I created a plugin which implements htaccess behaviour into nginx, especially things like RewriteRule, Allow and Deny, which can be crucial for web security. The plugin is used in my own productive environments without a problem.
I totally share the point of efficiency and speed in nginx, and why they didn't implement htaccess.
However, think about it. You cannot make it worse if you're using nginx plus htaccess. You still keep the great performance of nginx, plus you can drive your legacy appliances effortlessly on one webserver.
This is not supported officially in nginx. If you need this kind of functionality you will need to use Apache or some other http server which supports it.
That said, the official nginx reasoning is flawed because it conflates what users want to do with the way it is done. For example, nginx could easily check the directories only every 10 seconds / minute or so, or it could use inotify and similar mechanisms. This would avoid the need to check it on every request... But knowing that doesn't help you. :)
You could get around this limitation by writing a script that would wait for nginx config files to appear and then copy them to /etc/nginx/conf.d/. However there might be some security implications - as there is no native support for .htaccess in nginx, there is also no support for limiting allowed configuration directives in config files. YMMV.
Using the config file is one option, but the cool thing about the .htaccess file is that it provided a way for a web developer to have some control over server settings without having root access to the server. There doesn't seem to be anything like this on nginx which is a real bummer.
I understand how the way it's setup on apache slows down response times, but hoped there could be an nginx way to do the same thing without the performance hit... At least a way to do rewrites with regex on urls if nothing else.
"Is there no nginx way to do bulk redirects using regular expressions that doesn't slow down response times."
Just edit your database with myphpmyadmin.
Open myphpmyadmin select your database then find your "yourprefix_Posts" table.
Open it then click the "Search" tab, then "Find and Replace".
Select "post_content" in the dropdown
In the "Find" field, type URL you want to change: "website.com/oldURL".
In the "Replace" field, type the new URL: "website.com/newURL".
(To use regular expression, tick the "Regular Expression" box.)
NOTE: You can test this out by simply leaving the "Replace" field blank.
ALWAYS BACKUP database before making changes. This might sound scary but its really not. Its super simple and can be used to quickly replace just about anbything.
I want to modify my application URL from //localhost:8080/monitor/index.html to just monitor , so that on putting monitor on browser, my application should open. Is there a way to achieve this, can someone suggest the configuration changes which will be required for this.
Can I map my short URL to the existing one may be somewhere in web.xml. I am not sure about the approach any suggestions will be great.
Thanks and regards
Deb
You're mixing up several different protocol layers in your question.
If you just enter nothing but "monitor" in the browser URL bar the browser is going to first lookup "monitor" in DNS and finding nothing it will then probably send a query to Google or your configured search engine. In the past browsers have taken other steps, such as appending ".com" and prepending "www." but I don't think modern browsers do that any more.
So far, your server is not even remotely involved.
If you're a large ISP user (TimeWarner, Comcast) and use their DNS it's also possible the ISP will intercept your failed DNS lookup and route the request to a "helpful" search page (i.e. SPAM) of their own.
At this point the request is still nowhere near your server.
I suppose you could mess with the /etc/hosts file on your local system to resolve "monitor" to the proper hostname, but that's an extremely brittle solution that has to be hard coded on each machine you want to have this "shortcut" link (and which breaks when the hostname changes).
You're much better off just setting up a web shortcut in your browser that points to the right place.
I'm trying to use Liferay for http and https
if I include in portal-ext.properties:
company.security.auth.requires.https=true
web.server.protocol=https
Will be working ok with https but in http is showing incorrect themes due is trying to load https://domain.com/theme
If I remove this two lines is working ok for http but not for https.
What can I do?
IMHO mixed mode, e.g. offering http as well as https never gives you what you expect: You expect security from https, but you always risk leaking session information, e.g. being vulnerable to session-hijacking attacks (ala Firesheep). My actual advice would be to go https only if you do https for security. Read on if that's not an option for you, but don't complain when you find information leaking (this is not dependent on Liferay, but for any web-based environment)
What is the exact problem that you have with the themes? (images/css through http?) Which version of Liferay are you using?
Before you specify more, you might want to configure your theme's "virtual path", this will rewrite all the URLs referring to your theme. It's typically used to serve static resources through a webserver or cdn, but it works with any kind of URL. Simply using a protocol-relative URL should work (I love this mostly unknown http feature):
Add this to your theme's liferay-look-and-feel.xml:
<look-and-feel>
<theme id="my" name="My Theme">
<virtual-path>//domain.com/myTheme</virtual-path>
</theme>
</look-and-feel>
note that the URL omits the protocol part, http: or https:, thus the browser will use the same protocol that the whole page is loaded with.
Edit: corrected the xml. Will investigate if there's a problem with protocol-relative URLs in themes.
Edit 2: Something is weird. It seems, virtual-path does not work like this, but I recall it did earlier. Do you add domain.com as cdn.host.http or cdn.host.https? (this would be concatenated)
On related stuff, please check if you're running Apache in front of your appserver. In this case you might forward some traffic for the portal (e.g. in the virtual host for http) but not forward the traffic in the https virtual host.
The webserver hosting my website is not returning last-modified or expiry headers. I would like to rectify this to ensure my web content is cacheable.
I don't have access to the apache config files because the site is hosted on a shared environment that I have no control over. I can however make configurations via an .htaccess file. The server - apache 1.3 - is not configured with mod_expires or mod_headers and the company will not install these for me.
With these limitations in mind, what are my options?
Sorry for the post here. I recognise this question is not strictly a programming question, and more a sys admin question. When serverfault is public I'll make sure I direct questions of this nature there.
What sort of content? If static (HTML, images, CSS), then really the only way to attach headers is via the front-end webserver. I'm surprised the hosting company doesn't have mod_headers enabled, although they might not enable it for .htaccess. It's costing them more bandwidth and CPU (ie, money) to not cache.
If it's dynamic content, then you'll have control when generating the page. This will depend on your language; here's an example for PHP (it's from the PHP manual, and is a bad example, as it should also set the response code):
if (!headers_sent()) {
header('Location: http://www.example.com/');
exit;
}
Oh, and one thing about setting caching headers: don't set them for too long a duration, particularly for CSS and scripts. You may not think you want to change these, but you don't want a broken site while people still have the old content in their browsers. I would recommend maximum cache settings in the 4-8 hour range: good for a single user's session, or a work day, but not much more.
We are putting up a company blog at companyname.com/blog but for now the blog is a Wordpress installation that lives on a different server (blog.companyname.com).
The intention is to have the blog and web site both on the same server in a month or two, but that leaves a problem in the interim.
At the moment I am using mod_rewrite to do the following:
http://companyname.com/blog/article-name redirects to http://blog.companyname.com/article-name
Can I somehow keep the address bar displaying companyname.com/blog even though the content is coming from the latter blog.companyname.com?
I can see how to do this if it is on the same server and vhost, but not across a different server?
Thanks
Rather than using mod_rewrite, you could use mod_proxy to set up a reverse proxy on companyname.com, so that requests to http://companyname.com/blog/article-name are proxied (rather than redirected) to http://blog.companyname.com/article-name.
Here are more instructions and examples.
There is functionality with ZoneEdit called webforwards which could probably do this and hide what you are actually doing (unless someone looked into it).
The only thing that mod_rewrite can do is send HTTP header redirects, and those redirects (across servers) always result in the browser address bar reflecting the reality.
You should instead consider writing a 404 script that 'reflects' the blog. This would essentially be a transparent proxy, and many are already written.
The script would find if the requested page (that was 404'd) started with http://mycompany.com/blog/ . If it did, it would download and then send onto the client the blog page and associated files (probably caching them as well).
So requesting http://mycompany.com/blog/article_xyz would cause the 404 script to download and send http://blog.companyname.com/article_xyz.
It's probably more work than it's worth, but you might be able to design a simple enough 404 script that it's worthwhile.
-Adam