Redirect folder to different server

Question

I know you can redirect subdomains to a different server, but can you do the same with folders?

Say I have example.com. I can redirect mysubdomain.example.com to a different server, but can I redirect example.com/mysubdomain to a different server? I'd like to host a rails app in that folder on a site that runs php while still maintaining good search engines ratings (by not creating a sub domain which in my experience in recognized as a different site).

Any help?

Thanks!

Answer 1

As brock Batsell suggested, a solution can be proxying the requests. you'll usually find this behavior in web apps that use long polling services, like chats, and need to proxy out those services to a second web server to reduce the load on the main one (usually, apache + lighhtpd)

Here is the basic usage (assuming youre using apache, and the other web-server is listening on the 81 port):

LoadModule proxy_module modules/mod_proxy.so
LoadModule proxy_connect_module modules/mod_proxy_connect.so
LoadModule proxy_http_module modules/mod_proxy_http.so
LoadModule proxy_ftp_module modules/mod_proxy_ftp.so

ProxyRequests Off
ProxyPreserveHost On
proxypass /folder-to-proxy http://localhost:81/folder
proxypassReverse /folder-to-proxy http://localhost:81/folder

<Proxy http://localhost:81/>
    Order Allow,Deny
    Allow from all
</Proxy>

Just replace the localhost and port number with your second server host and port.

Please note that even if you dont need to proxy the ftp traffic, in apache the proxy_ftp_module must be enabled as well.

Answer 2

You can only do this via a proxy, which can forward all requests to the /mysubdomain folder to a particular IP and port, get the response, then return the response to the user transparently.

Pretty much any mainstream web server will have a module to do this if you have control over its configuration file. (Apache has mod_proxy, nginx has HTTP Proxy, lighttpd has its own mod_proxy.)