I've created a really simple databaseless php application that I want to offer as a hosted solution. I've enable wildcard subdomains so that users can sign up and create a subdomain (e.g. "user.myapp.com"). However, I would like to offer the ability for my users to use a custom domain as well if they prefer. I'm pretty sure this can be accomplished by asking the user to add an A Record to their custom domain pointing to my server's IP, but I'm not sure how to handle the domain on my end once they create an A Record pointing to my server's IP.
So, say a user signs up for my service under "user.myapp.com" and then they decide they want to use a custom domain "someuser.com" instead. My specific question is — once the user adds an A Record to their domain "someuser.com" pointing to my server's IP, how do I tell my server to point that domain to "user.myapp.com"? Or is there an easier way to do this?
You'd need to first setup your server to accept requests from someuser.com, which is entirely different than setting up a wildcard for your server alias (e.g. *.myapp.com). You can have a default vhost handle all the hostnames that no other vhost is setup to handle, but then you're still left with mapping someuser.com to user.myapp.com.
Depending on how you've setup your php application, the user's going to need to enter the custom domain they've registered that they had point to your app, then you'll need to know to do that mapping internally by checking the $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] server variable to see what host the request is for, and if it's for someuser.com, then map it to user.myapp.com.
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I want to give my customer the ability to create their own todos list app/web.
So, I thought they could register to my application, for instance:
http://mytodos-app.com/signup and provide all preferences such as theme, title, name...
Now i could use the url/router ability to get some unique identifier from the url and use the same app, but fetch data for each customer.
i.e: http://mytodos-app.com/todos/:someuniqeid
1) is it sounds ok? or are there better strategies for this scenario?
2) if it's ok, If I want to give them the ability to configure their own domain (like in shopify you get some dynamic domain yourname.shopify.com).
So, what is the most popular/professional way to do it? I want it to be easy to the customer. any suggestions?
Other than the "cool factor", there is no benefit to using actual customized sub-domains.
You can synthesize the behavior by:
In DNS, set up a wildcard CNAME entry for *.DOMAIN.com to point to www.DOMAIN.com, be sure to buy a matching wildcard ssl/tls certificate.
Configure the web server to respond to all hostnames.
After user registration. SANITIZE the username(or whatever identifier) value.
Set an authorization cookie with the domain=DOMAIN.com option to force it not to
be a host cookie.
Redirect to username.DOMAIN.com. Same server different name.
Check the cookie in the route to serve the correct pages. Just like
you would with any login.
If there is no cookie, use the host information to populate the
username portion of the login page, or display public todos?
Make sure any Javascript scripts hosted on the site and all internal links are loaded by relative addressing.
The technique is much safer than actually creating real subdomains.
Here's the situation. Website.com is an ASP site which needs a blog that is to be Wordpress. So the website.com/blog needs to be hosted onto a php-friendly server. The company hosting the ASP site doesn't want to have anything to do with Wordpress so we have to use some of the shared hosting providers.
How do I have the Blog section placed onto an entirely different server? I've heard this is done with CNAME, but I've never used it. Most of the research I've done revolves around subdomains, but I need a subfolder mapping, and there's not much to read about putting subfolders onto different servers with a different IP and everything.
Thanks.
There are a few different options:
you can bring the traffic to your own server and then redirect to
the correct location
you can bring the traffic to your own server and then proxy it to the correct location
you can direct the traffic to the correct location either via full page or an IFRAME type mechanism
Each option has some benefits and drawbacks depending your devs knowledge level and your infrastructure. Regarding subdomains, you could use a combination approach where you, for example, use subdomain.yourdomain.com to point to a server instance (can be the same server or a totally different one) that maps the subdomain.yourdomain.com name to a specific path, usually via Host header.
A CNAME is a function in DNS that says "Whatever thing you wanted to find for this name, use the same thing for that other name instead". When you're working with web stuff the "thing" in there is nearly always an IP address.
That is, what a CNAME can do for you is to say that when a user's web browser tries to look up the IP address for website.com, it will use the IP address for someotherwebsite.com. Note the total absence of anything web-related, like subfolders, in this. CNAMEs work on whole domain names, nothing else. Since you want to serve only a part of the stuff at a particular name from another server, CNAME cannot help you. CNAME is the wrong tool for you problem. Do not taunt happy fun CNAME.
In order to serve website.com/blog from another server than website.com, you pretty much have to do some sort of reverse proxying (where the ASP site's server relays requests between the user and the Wordpress server). It's probably easier and more robust to give the Wordpress site its own name (blog.website.com or something), and redirect to that from website.com/blog, but only you can know if that's politically possible in your case.
Im running SAAS where customer signs up and a script installation takes place in a subdomain, i.e., subdomain.mydomain.com and starts using the site. Now I want to allow my customers to map their FULL domain eg. www.customerdomain.com to subdomain.mydomain.com, something like bloggers.com or wordpress does. How I can do this. I am using Linux dedicated server. Help would be greatly appreciated. I dont want URL masking or redirection.
I'm currently developing a project and have recently faced the exact same issue. Here's two ways you can go about solving it:
Super-easy
A little more tricky, but not impossible
The first would be to allow domain mapping of subdomains (e.g. http://subdomain.example.com). This is dead simple for your users to setup. They would head over to their registrar and create a new CNAME record as follows:
(name) subdomain.example.com -> (record) subdomain.yoursite.com
Unlike changing A Records, this change only takes about 120 mins to fully propagate (compared with up to 72 hrs).
If your users pay for the privilege of using the domain mapping feature (i.e. it's not made available to users on a free plan), then you could could store each user's custom subdomain in your database, then check against this (in .php) when they try to access your website via their custom subdomain. If they're allowed, do nothing, otherwise redirect them to an alternate url.
So that's the easy one over and done with. Now for trickier option. If you have a dedicated IP address, or in your case a dedicated server, you can use the cPanel API to dynamically create A Records, this way users would be able to map their domain (rather just their subdomain) to your website. You would need to make the following A Record for your customer, together with getting them to update their domain's A Record with your dedicated IP address:
Your server:
(name) customersdomain.com -> (record) subdomain.yoursite.com
Customer's registrar:
www -> (record) [YOUR IP ADDRESS]
I'm not going to detail the API process for you, but you can read through the documentation here:
http://docs.cpanel.net/twiki/bin/view/SoftwareDevelopmentKit/ApiAuthentication
Anyways, I hope this helps and that you have fun building your website!
J
The (name) represents the custom domain belonging to your customer (e.g. customerdomain.com). The (record) would point to their subdomain on your SAAS site. So if I signed up to your website with a username of 'nike', you would use 'nike.yoursite.com'.
J
Install the wordpress domain mapping plugin, obviously your wordpress installation is setup for Wordpress MU.
Now the way I understand it you want to give your bloggers the opportunity to host their blog on their own personal domain while still hosting on your sever. Under "Domain Mapping" in "Settings" of "Network Administrator"(Super User).
There is Domain Options:
You want to check the User domain mapping page that's Option 3.
This will allow your blog users to specify the domain of their personal site. One thing to remind them is that their DNS records should point to your web server.
I am having a bit of a struggle grasping how to use custom domains with my app. Its the common case of having an app that assigns users to subdomains, ex. user.theapp.com and they want to use a CNAME so m.theirsite.com resolves to the application. It seems that most services that do this require you to tell them what your custom domain is, and that just adding a CNAME record doesn't work. Steps:
User creates an account.
We tell them they can make a CNAME entry to yourstuff.theapp.com (which is the current location).
This is my confusion. After 1&2 my custom domain still isnt working.. so once the client makes that CNAME record and provides us with "m.theirsite.com", what special magic do we do with it to make those sites "the same"?
Thank you in advance.
Our solution was to use PHP/MySQL to solve this. As normal, you should have the external domain/subdomain CNAME'd to your app, however as you will see, the CNAME entry doesn't need to be to the exact subdomain on the app. Next, you will build an area into your database where a user can tell you what external site they have CNAME'd from. At this point, you will perform most of your authentication on the website based on the HTTP host, either grabbing the subdomain and using it as a client, or checking if the HTTP host is in your list of CNAME's and then referencing the client from there.
What the CNAME does is just point to a server location, so if you are using wildcards in your apache configuration, foo.myapp.com resolves to the same location as bar.myapp.com, but in the app can use the host to pull out the subdomain and find the client ("foo" and "bar"). When using a CNAME, like m.mywebsite.com --cnamed--> foo.myapp.com, the application no longer has that client information in the HTTP host, and as we mentioned, the apache wildcard setup (*.myapp.com) just tosses out the subdomain.. so because of this the client must tell us "I will be visiting from m.mywebsite.com, so make that a valid host name for my authentication as well."
Background context: ASP.NET / IIS (not sure if it matters)
I have a web app at example.com, and a user of my app gets his own content page at an address like example.com/abc-trinkets. I would like to offer the user the ability to point his own registered domain at my web app so his content is accessed at abctrinkets.com. Initially looking on the order of 10-100 users with custom domains.
Ideally, I would like my user to just have a single hostname or IP address that he needs to know to configure properly with his registrar, and if I change the setup of my servers (different host, change addresses, load balancing, etc.) the user will not have to change his settings.
I have no trouble handling the requests once they hit my web app, but I am looking for input on the best way to set the routing up so requests actually come to my app/server. I would like a "catch-all" type of behavior that does not require me to individually configure anything for each domain a user might point to me.
I assume I will need some kind of layer between the address I give my user and my actual server ... is this like a managed DNS service or some other type of nameserver thing I would set up with my host? Is this something simple that should already be handled by a few simple settings on my webserver? I worry that I am making this more complicated than it needs to be.
Write a script that examines the Host header in the request. In your example, if it's abctrinkets.com, then you'd either redirect or forward the request to /abc-trinkets. You'd still need a database or something for mapping the domain names to the URLs; if you're going to allow arbitrary domain names for each user account, then there's no possible way to avoid that.