Making a URL suffix to prefix - apache

I have a url [Like this: hostname.com] and I want to make hostname.com/blog to blog.hostname.com. I am using Apache web server. Let me know if I need to provide more info!

This should work for you:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)? hostname\.com$
RewriteRule ^([^/.]+)(/.*)?$ http://$1.hostname.com$2 [L,R=301]

If you're not just doing a redirect, and you're actually setting up a server on blog.hostname.com, then you would need to configure Apache to use another (virtual) host for each subdomain in extra/httpd-vhosts.conf. See http://foundationphp.com/tutorials/apache22_vhosts.php for a tonne of info on configuring Virtual Hosts.
Just a quick example from memory:
<VirtualHost blog.hostname.com:80>
DocumentRoot /srv/www/blog
ServerName blog.hostname.com
</VirtualHost>
This will mean that the virtual host on blog.hostname.com will display the same pages as hostname.com/blog. This is assuming your document root is /srv/www (ie a linux setup). If not, just insert the correct paths where necssary.

Wow, it's been a while since I first made my SO account and this question. Anyway, I've learned a good amount since then, and now know that what I was trying to accomplish was to make a subdomain. The other two answers are correct in that it will setup a subdomain... if I had a domain pointing to it. I was using a NoIP domain for a tiny AWS free tier VPS, and the free NoIP stuff doesn't let you make a subdomain. I assumed that it would magically work if I told my VPS I wanted a subdomain. Whoops!
Backstory aside, to make a subdomain you need to use your domain host to add a new record pointing to your server, and configure your server to accept that new subdomain. Adding a subdomain depends on your provider, but now I use cloudflare, so adding an A / CNAME record following this guide will work. Once you add the record, use the other two answers to make apache listen on that domain.
Thanks for the (almost) 5 years of answers to now, SO!

Related

Hosting not loading pages

i am new to web hosting, but i purchased a domain from namecheap.com and i purchased web hosting from ramnode.com to host my domain, i am using centOS 32bit as my server, and i have pointed my domain to ramnode nameservers that were provided to me.
The problem i am having here is that everytime i load my website, it just says
Index Of/
cgi-bin/
even though i have placed my web page files in var/www, and var/www/html like ramnode support told me too, it still does not want to work. Any suggestions?
It all depends on how your server is setup but here are a few things to check.
What are the permission levels for your files, who owns them and what group are they in? If you don't have proper permissions set they may not show. If the wrong person owns them they may not show.
Read over your httpd.conf (centos should have it in /etc/httpd/conf) see how your server is setup. It may not have a default setup, perhaps your using a virtual host?
In a nutshell we need more information to help you out.
You should have an
.htaccess or htaccess.txt file in your WWW root, whithin that file you need the following line:
DirectoryIndex index.htm index.html index.php
That is the priority order of your index page. (Your web project needs an index page)
So in otherwords your webserver will serve the first matching file that it finds in that list.
A quick fix if you cant find the htaccess file, is just make sure you have an index.html file in your var/www
I just reset my nameservers to point to ramnode's last night and am experiencing the same issue as the OP this morning.
I previously had no FQDN for the ramnode server and simply used my /etc/hosts file locally to point to the ramnode server. Through that method, I was able to make sure everything was setup just so - apache virtualhosts, .htaccess files, apache.conf, and httpd.conf files all operating as desired.
It seems to have something to do with the installation of the cpanel, which auto-fills DNS A records with a different IP than the one I was provided. changing it to ramnode's original IP simply leads to the same cgi-bin directory index. But going going to the original ip in the browser leads to my site, as I have the apache virtualhost set for the IP.
Ramnode sets subdomain a records such as cpanel.mydomain.com all set to the same new IP and those do function, so it leads me to believe a ramnode server is capturing the trafic elsewhere and should be sending it on but isn't.
It's a bit confusing where cpanel is taking me and why redirecting to my the domain.com. A record to the original IP seems to have no effect.

DNS and apache redirection

I'm having issues to clearly manage my website redirection. Let say that I'd like to create a invisible redirect from www.siteA.com to www.siteB.com/content. Here you have what I'd like to have:
www.siteA.com --DNS--> www.siteB.com --Apache on siteB --> /wwww/content/siteA/
For the first part, I can do it using "CNAME" configuration at DNS level.
However, I'd like to have a kind of Apache rewrite rule on "www.siteB.com" machine in order to redirect to "/wwww/content/siteA/" only if we come from www.siteA.com DNS requests.
Any idea?
Did you look at apache virtual hosts http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/vhosts/ ? It does exactly what you ask for as I understood it - at least the second part.

apache reverse proxy: how to forward proxy server's HTTP_HOST

Our local development setup requires a box in the DMZ, and each developer has a line in its apache config for proxying. Looks something like:
ProxyPreserveHost on
ProxyPass /user1/ {user1's IP}
ProxyPassReverse /user1/ {user1's IP}
ProxyPass /user2/ {user2's IP}
ProxyPassReverse /user2/ {user2's IP}
#etc
Our public URLs become {DMZ server}/user1, {DMZ server}/user2, etc. The problem is that on the dev's boxes, the value of $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] is just {DMZ server}, without the user's subdirectory. The desired behavior is to have /user%/ as the real host name.
I've tried overriding the HOST var, and some rewrite rules, but nothing has worked.
Creating subdomains is not an option.
thank you for any help!
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_proxy.html#proxypreservehost seems to be the answer.
Im going to take a stab and suggest this:
SetEnvIf Host (.*) custom_host=$1
RequestHeader set X-Custom-Host-Header "%{custom_host}e/%{REQUEST_URI}e/%{QUERY_STRING}e"
That should hopefully set a request header called X-Custom-Host-Header that you can then pickup in PHP. If you want, you can try to override the Host Header, but I'm not sure on the implications of that. The Host header is a special HTTP header and generally only contains the host portion of an HTTP request, not the full request url.
Untested unfortunately, but it would help if you could clarify in a bit more detail what you are looking for.
EDIT, THIRD ANSWER:
Looks like Apache has heard this complaint before and the solution is mod_substitute. You need to use it to rewrite all the URLs returned in the document to insert /user1/.
EDIT, SECOND ANSWER:
Based on the additional information in your comments, I'd say your Apache config on your DMZ server is correct. What you are asking for is to have the developer machines generate URLs that include their context path (which is the J2EE term for something analogous to your /user1/ bit). I don't have any experience with PHP so I don't know if it has such a facility, but a quick search suggests it does not.
Otherwise, you'd have to roll your own function that converts a relative URL to an absolute URL, make that configurable so you can have it add something to the host name, and then force everyone to use that function exclusively for generating URLs. See, for some guidance, "Making your application location independent" in this old (outdated?) PHP best practices article for a solution to the related problem of finding local files.
PREVIOUS ANSWER: (doesn't work, causes redirect loop)
I'm still not clear what you are trying to do or what you mean by "Running on the dev apps are apache and PHP mainly, for hosting various applications", but as an educated guess, have you tried:
ProxyPass /user1/ {user1's IP}/user1/
ProxyPassReverse /user1/ {user1's IP}/user1/
If I were setting up the sort of environment you seem to be wanting to have, I'd want $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] to be {DMZ server} on every dev machine so that the dev machine's environment looks just like (or at least more like) production to the code running on it.

help regarding setting up pseudo/fake subdomains on apache

First of all, sorry if I got the term 'pseudo subdomain' wrong.
what I am trying to achieve is this-
When someone registers on my application, they get a new url like..
yourname.myapp.tld
I dont want to use the subdomain system for this. To be frank, I dont know how the subdomains exactly work but it guess it requires a folder per subdomain inside the document root and then the server redirects the requests there.
Can this be achieved by doing something like -
when a visiter types any subdomain, (anything.myapp.tld), he is able to access myapp . In the index.php file i will explode the $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] to get the subdomain which i will store in session and will thereafter act as an identifier for that user. Ideally i wouldnt want to create any vhosts or add many lines to the hosts file. Can this be achieved with just one vhost?
Is this possible with mod rewrite or something ?
Yes you can archive this using wildcard that needs to be configured on both, the dns server and http server
On the dns a entry like this (installing dns on ubuntu https://help.ubuntu.com/10.04/serverguide/C/dns.html):
; wildcard subdomains are all directed to this IP
; of course this should be the IP of your web server
*.domain.tld. IN A 1.2.3.4
At apache an entry like this:
<VirtualHost 111.22.33.55>
DocumentRoot /www/subdomain
ServerName www.domain.tld
ServerAlias *.domain.tld
</VirtualHost>
What happens after is that everything.domain.tld will be going to your main folder so you can use the index.php to redirect it to the right place or even an htaccess using mod_rewrite.

How to setup sub-domains like blogspot

What should do to setup a sub-domain for the users when they sign-up into my site.
What are the infrastructure required? I am using Linux servers.
You can either use a specific DNS (CNAME or A/AAAA) entry for each known subdomain, or a wild-card DNS entry that'll accept *.example.com:
$ORIGIN example.com
foo IN A 12.34.6.78
bar IN A 12.34.6.78
or
$ORIGIN example.com
* IN A 12.34.6.78
The advantage of this latter is that no changes are required to either DNS or Apache configuration once the service is running. The disadvantage is that all such wildcard lookups must (by definition) end up returning the same IP address.
The Apache configuration will depend on your requirements, both for end-user control and security. Note that if the users have permission to run CGI scripts on the server then additional setup will be needed to ensure that that's done securely.
Depending on whether content is static or dynamic this will also affect your configuration:
Use mod_vhost_alias to map individual virtual hosts into their individual directories on the server.
If you really want, create a separate <VirtualHost> section for each known site, but then you'll have to restart Apache each time a new user signs up
Use a single <VirtualHost> and then look at the hostname part of the requested URL (from the $SERVER_NAME environment variable) in the scripts that render the output to figure out which user's content to display.
You can make a CNAME entry/ A Record in your DNS settings, for each subdomain
A CNAME record is a record in your
Domain Management Settings that allows
you to control a subdomain of your
domain.
To automate it along with registration, you can write a script which is executed for each user, when s/he registers.
You can refer to this link, as well, for a step-by-step process for Apache:
How to setup subdomains in apache
(since you mentioned Linux, I assume it must be APache. Please mention if it is otherwise)
Alternate Solution
You can also refer to the wildcard solution, given by Alnitak, in the same thread. I find his is an easier way. :)
infrastructure includes access the the dns server to add a wildcard entry, and rewrite rules in Apache.
Try these answers:
How to let PHP to create subdomain automatically for each user?
How to make subdomain user accounts in a webapp
or this link:
http://jam.jrox.com/docs/index.php?article=76
If your using Linux server's I'm assuming your using Apache as your webserver.
You'll have to setup proper DNS routing for the sub domain as well as a virtual host.
Virtual Hosts are fairly easy to setup but I'm not sure how easy it is to do them on the fly progmatically.
Most of the time it's as easy as editing your apache config file and adding the following:
Port 80
ServerName www.mydomain.com
NameVirtualHost *:80
<VirtualHost *:80>
DocumentRoot /www/user-bob
ServerName bob.mydomain.com
...
</VirtualHost>
<VirtualHost *:80>
DocumentRoot /www/user-sally
ServerName sally.mydomain.com
...
</VirtualHost>
The VirtualHost Documention will probably of some use to you.
Apache allows you to specify any number of 'sites' based on subdomains on a single server. Creating a new 'site definition' file with the appropriate subdomain information in it, along with proper DNS wildcards, will do what you want.
In other words, the process is like this:
Setup wildcards so that *.mysite.com directs to the proper server.
When a new user signs up, create the proper Apache site definition file - you'll probably have a base template that you put the right subdomain information into and save.
Make Apache re-read its configuration.
Profit.
IMPORTANT This is based on a Debian-style Apache configuration, where the config files are included in a directory, and the main configuration reads all the config files in that directory. This will simplify things a great deal, because adding/removing subdomains will mean adding/removing files, rather than editing a single file, and so the process will be much easier to automate.