Bind subdomain to a Magento Controller

Question

I am working on an application for which I want to create few sub-domains in system, which will be served by Magento application. One example scenario can be creating separate sub-domains for system user's profile. Where User A will have dedicated url user-a.example.com and user B will have a url user-b.example.com. Now, I want to able to map these sub-domains to a controller which will in turn fetch profile information and render it for a particular user.

My current approach involves use of Reverse Proxy on webserver level, where i am mapping subdomains <USER>.example.com to controller http://example.com/user/profile/index/name/<USER>/. Which works well untill i want to perfom some operation based on current url. Even though user sees url with subdomain on the page but in the background request is being made to http://example.com/user/profile/index/name/<USER>/ and Magento system returns full url as current page url.

So, I was wondering if there is any way to bind a subdomain to controller directly in Magento system. I went through few questions posted around this but those does not seems to much useful here.

Answer 1

I think your best bet will be to use Apaches URL rewrite functionality for more information see: https://www.addedbytes.com/articles/for-beginners/url-rewriting-for-beginners/ The other option would be to write a completely new router but this will require a good understanding of request processing in Magento. https://shop.vinaikopp.com/grokking-magento/ has some very good information to help you with this.

Magento does not provide this as a standard feature and you will need to do it either via apache or by writing a Magento router.

Something that you could use would be along the lines of:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^([^./]+)\.example\.com$
RewriteCond %1 !=www
RewriteRule ^ /user/profile/index/name/%1/

Answer 2

Try using Magento rewrites instead. Im not sure if this will work, but you can give it a try.

<global>
    <rewrite>
        <designer_url>
            <from><![CDATA[#^/author/id/#]]></from>
            <to><![CDATA[/designer/index/index/id/]]></to>
            <complete>1</complete>
        </designer_url>
    </rewrite>
</global>

See this question for some more info.

Answer 3

Since subdomains are above Magento in the grand scheme of things, NS A Record mapped with your name server. Then adding the mod_rewrite rule to the controller path as Martijn Schot mentioned would be the ideal approach.

There are other ways to facilitate this also. Such as Replication, creating a path in the file system when a customer registers, with nothing more than a redirect to the proper controller in the application. Keep in mind this may pose scaling problems.

Another option to consider is Wildcard DNS Record.

SO Answer taken from:

• https://stackoverflow.com/a/183971/158325

You're looking to create a custom A record.

I'm pretty sure that you can use wildcards when specifying A records which would let you do something like this:

*.mywebsite.com       IN  A       127.0.0.1

127.0.0.1 would be the IP address of your webserver. The method of actually adding the record will depend on your host.

---

Doing it like http://mywebsite.com/user would be a lot easier to set up if it's an option.

Then you could just add a .htaccess file that looks like this:

Options +FollowSymLinks

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^([aA-zZ])$  dostuff.php?username=$1

In the above, usernames are limited to the characters a-z

---------- The rewrite rule for grabbing the subdomain would look like this:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(^.*)\.mywebsite.com
RewriteRule (.*)  dostuff.php?username=%1