Create subdomains on the fly with .htaccess (PHP)

Question

I am looking to create a system which on signup will create a subdomain on my website for the users account area.

e.g. johndoe.website.com

I think it would

Answer 1

The easiest way is to redirect all subdomains (with wildcard *) to point to your /wwwroot. Then put .htaccess to this folder with the following code:

RewriteCond %{ENV:REDIRECT_SUBDOMAIN} ="" 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^([a-z0-9][-a-z0-9]+)\.domain\.com\.?(:80)?$ [NC] 
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/%1 -d 
RewriteRule ^(.*) %1/$1 [E=SUBDOMAIN:%1,L] 
RewriteRule ^ - [E=SUBDOMAIN:%{ENV:REDIRECT_SUBDOMAIN},L]

This will accomplish that every subfolder of the /wwwroot folder in acceptable via subdomain (foldername.domain.com).

Found this years ago on http://www.webmasterworld.com/apache/3163397.htm