Note: It is likely you will need root access to carry out apache config alterations
12-02-07: Fixed mistake in the directory comparison line.
If you want to be able to redirect blah.domain.com to domain.com/blah/ so that blah.domain.com is shown in the address bar here's a quick and dirty how to:
First off if you want any subdomain to be able to be redirected first you need to set-up your DNS correctly. In my case this was as simple as going to the people that host my domain and adding an A record with the wildcard * that pointed to my server's ip address. Bear in mind your DNS settings may take a while to work so be patient. Before you proceed you should check that anything.domain.com resolves to the ip address of your server. You can check this by running:
ping iloveapache.domain.comThis should respond with something like this:
[root@cheekymonkey conf]# ping iloveapache.domain.com
PING iloveapache.domain.com (62.193.xxx.xxx) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from my.serverhostame.com (62.193.xxx.xxx): icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=0.058 ms
64 bytes from my.serverhostame.com (62.193.xxx.xxx): icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.040 ms
64 bytes from my.serverhostame.com (62.193.xxx.xxx): icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.071 ms
64 bytes from my.serverhostame.com (62.193.xxx.xxx): icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=0.028 msThe next step is to set-up the virtual host to respond to the wildcard subdomains. In the case of plesk you have to set-up a vhost.conf file but on any other apache installation you can just edit httpd.conf and look for the <VirtualHost> that corresponds to your site. If you are using Plesk you will need to ssh in to your server and create a vhost.conf file if it doesn't already exist here where <domain.com> is your domain:
/var/www/vhosts/<domain.com>/conf/vhost.confOpen that file with the command line editor of your choice and add the following directives:
ServerAlias *.domain.com
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.* [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^([^\.]+)\.domain\.com
RewriteCond /var/www/vhosts/domain.com/httpdocs/%1 -d
RewriteRule ^(.*) /%1/$1 [L]Substitute domain.com for your domain. Now here's a quick walkthrough how these rules work. The first line ServerAlias *.domain.com tells apache to accept anysubdomain.domain.com.
Next the rewrite rules work as follows:
- The first line of mod_rewrite
!^www.*only matches urls that don't begin with www. You don't want to redirect www.domain.com to www.domain.com/www/ do you? Note: you could add additional lines like these to prevent re-writing other subdomains like secure.domain.com if that should not be redirected to domain.com/secure/ - The second line
^([^\.]+)\.*$captures into a backreference anything that doesn't have a period e.g. the subdomain. The plus makes sure that there is at least one character that matches. - The next condition checked is that the directory captured into the backreference does actually exist hence the -d.
- This last line
^(.*) /%1/$1 [L]takes the requested path and dumps it into a back reference and then rewrites it to point to the a directory (the subdomain backreference captured in the Rewrite conditions above) . In other words %1 is the subdomain backreference and $1 is the path backreference (that captured by .*). The important thing to rember is you can refer to backreferences in rewriteCond lines with % and backreferences in rewriteRules with $. Lastly the [L] (last) means doen't further rewrite this URL. Note: You might want to leave this out if you are doing any subsequent rewrites, be sure to test what you have set-up thoroughly!!!
Now once you have made those changes if you are running plesk you will need to apply your vhost.conf changes with the following command:
/usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/websrvmng --reconfigure-vhost --vhost-name=<domain.com>And then whether are using Plesk or not you need to restart apache e.g:
service httpd restartNow you should find that if you set-up a directory called "meegan" with a valid index.html file in it. meegan.domain.com should find that file. The job's a good'un.