How to achieve subdomain type domain names with php

Question

I am developing a site where users will have permalinks for them like user.domain.com or domain.com/user and i want to achieve this by php code. foe ex. for username stack the permalink is stack and on going to stack.domain.com or domain.com/stack it should go to profile page of user!

This is not a task for PHP alone. What server environment are you on? — Pekka, May 18 '11 at 11:12
possible duplicate of http://stackoverflow.com/questions/79764/wildcard-subdomains — jimy, May 18 '11 at 11:13
stack.domain.com will be at dns side you need to setup subdomain yeah domain.com/stack this could be possible with php — Vishwanath Dalvi, May 18 '11 at 11:15

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered May 18 '11 at 11:18

1

you should check if your webserver has those "wildcards", then you could achive this by writting a magic virutal host witch will handle that.

try a virtual host like this:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName local
ServerAlias *.local
VirtualDocumentRoot /var/www/%1/public_html
UseCanonicalName Off
</VirtualHost>

source: http://neziric.org/2010/06/dynamic-apache-vhosts-2/

answered May 18 '11 at 11:18

metaforce

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I have bought the server space. So this virtual host configuration of apache cant help. one and only way is to do it by my site itself. – Pankaj May 18 '11 at 12:02

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered May 18 '11 at 11:24

Let's split the two cases:

user.domain.com

For this to work, you should first configure your DNS so that *.domain.com points to your server. Then in index.php, you can check if $_SERVER["HTTP_HOST"] matches something.domain.com (using e.g. preg_match). After verifying something is a valid username, you can either display the user's profile page or redirect to the profile.

Caution: make sure that any subdomain you use yourself, like for example www., is not a valid username.

domain.com/user

To implement this, you need to setup some kind of catch-all for non-existing pages. One way would be to instruct your webserver to serve a php-file when it encounters a 404. This file could then use the $_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"] variable to determin if there if a user profile is requested.

Caution: Make sure that any /something that is already a valid page is not a valid username. Alternatively you could use a prefix like domain.com/u/user to be more flexible in the names of your own pages.

How to achieve subdomain type domain names with php

2 Answers2

user.domain.com

domain.com/user