Create subdomain upon user registration

Question

I have a website where I want users that sign up to get their own subdomain. This subdomain is virtual, and every subdomain uses the same web server files.

I use PHP

Answer 1

Can you tell apache to read an extra .conf file? (traditionally you store your vhosts in httpd-vhosts.conf)

if so, add something like the following and restart your webserver

NameVirtualHost *:80


        DocumentRoot /abs/path/to/webroot
        ServerName   domainname.com
        ServerAlias *.domainname.com
        
                AllowOverride All
                Order allow,deny
                Allow from all
        

then in php, you can see which subdomain the user is requesting by inspecting:

$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']

ie. if the user requests http://user1.domainname.com/index.php

$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] will have user1.domainname.com

you can then explode('.', $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']) to inspect each segment.. etc.