how to create a virtual subdomain system?

Rollo Tamasi

a project i'm going to undertake in the summer will require a user system which generates a virtual subdomain for users who register with my site.

For example the user john signs up and is given a subdomain to access his account, john.website.com, which when rendered in the browser will automatically bring up http://website.com/profile.php?username=john or similar.

How can this be acheived? I know can it can be done with .htaccess but won't that require configuration from myself each time a new user signs up? I would like this system to be automated as much as possible. I will be developing in PHP so if anyone knows of a way to do this....

Cheers

mneylon

You'll also need to wildcard the DNS

Have a look at Wordpress MU. There's support for on the fly sub-domains in that, though I can't remember off the top of my head what you have to do to make it happen

Serbian

Rollo Tamasi wrote:

I know can it can be done with .htaccess but won't that require configuration from myself each time a new user signs up?

You can do this with a combination of Wildcard DNS as Michele points out and mod_rewrite. The rewrite rule would look something like this:

RewriteCond  Host:  (?:www\.)?site1\.com
RewriteRule  (.*)   /profile.php?username=$1

You wouldn't need to add to this rule each time someone adds a profile, it's completely automated.

Rollo Tamasi

very good. I will look more into Wildcard DNS and mod_rewrite. Cheers lads.


Found this code on the net which should do the trick.

RewriteEngine On

# Extract the subdomain part of domain.com
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^([^\.]+)\.website\.com$ [NC]

# Check that the subdomain part is not www and ftp and mail
RewriteCond %1 !^(www|ftp|mail)$ [NC]

# Redirect all requests to a php script passing as argument the subdomain
RewriteRule ^.*$ http://www.website.com/profile.php?username=%1 [R,L]

cianuro

Take a look here:
http://photomatt.net/2003/10/10/wildcard-dns-and-sub-domains/

Hope that helps.