Dynamically configured virtual hosting

Question

Helo! I would like to prepare a dynamic virtual host for all subdomains that will be created in future using mod_rewrite. All subdomains would be configured prety much same way, so i thought of using dynamic VH configuration. I want my document root for each subdomain to be /home/user/public_html/subdomainName.

I've tried with following configuration, but had no success:

<VirtualHost xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:80>
    # get the server name from the Host: header
    UseCanonicalName Off

    <Directory /home/user/public_html/>
    # ExecCGI is needed here because we can't force
    # CGI execution in the way that ScriptAlias does
      Options FollowSymLinks ExecCGI
    </Directory>

    RewriteEngine On

    # a ServerName derived from a Host: header may be any case at all
    RewriteMap lowercase int:tolower

    #rule that is suposed to set document root of virtual host!??? 
    RewriteRule ^([a-z-]+)\.domain\.com/?(.*) /home/user/public_html/$1/$2

</VirtualHost>

The rule or somethinh seems to be wrong andit doesn't apply. I've never worked with dynamic VH before so i have no idea where i'm wrong...

Answer 1

This is a need a lot of people had before you. So there's an apache module which can do that for you mod_vhost_alias http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_vhost_alias.html

Provides for dynamically configured mass virtual hosting

Answer 2

instead of dynamic virtual hosts, you can also do this using wildcard dns which means configuring {anything}.yourdomain.tld to point to your server.

This will also get you same document root for each domain.

note that you will need to add ServerAlias *.yourdomain.tld to the virtual host entry

Answer 3

With RewriteRule you can't access the domainname. Also use RewriteCond for that part and use %1 etc. for backreference.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^([a-z-]+)\.domain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) %1/$1

The only problem is this will create a continues loop of prepending the subdomainname string. So what I normally do is create a separate folder for subdomains, like 'subdomains'

RewriteRule ^subdomains - [L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^([a-z-]+)\.domain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) subdomains/%1/$1