I want to implement something like Tumblr or Wordpress by giving user the option to have their domain name point to their profiles. For instances user go to their domain registrar and the IP of my server so then: www.usersdomain.com will point to www.mysite.com/userid without actually forwarding so that domain name will still show in the address bar.
I wish you can describe the details for steps of doing so.
I'm using Ruby on Rails if that's make a difference. My production environment has Nginx and Passenger.
My point of view:
Users change DNS records of their sites to point to the IP address of your server. After that operation, every HTTP request to their domains will be "catched" by your IP address and your application (you should reconfigure your HTTP server, however).
Every HTTP request contains the Host header. That header allows us to make such thing as virtual hosting: many and many hosts can point to only one IP;
In your application just extract Host from the request and query your database for user with such host.
Flush contents of his page and that's all.
For example, IP of your service is 100.100.100.100, my domain is redsocks.com. I need to change DNS (an A record) of my domain to point to your IP. Supposedly, I did.
When I point my browser to my domain, the browser makes the following request (or similar) to your own IP, not mine:
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: redsocks.com
...
Your application has the code (pseudocode) that deals with my request:
user = User.find_by_domain(REQUEST["Host"])
if user == nil
render_not_found_page
else
contents = Content.get_contents_of_user(user)
render_contents_of_user contents
end
And I see my very own page within your service on my domain.
Related
I have one doubts, Please clarify this
We have currently host the one sub application to under main application. like below
URL like
www.Examples.com/internal
internal is a sub application hosted under Examples main application.
But, i want to host the sub application as main application like below
But, the URL should be same like
www.Examples.com/internal
Note: Internal application maintain in single server or different server but, the URL should be same.
Is there any posibilities to maintain website like this?
Thanks,
Mathan Kumar H J
A more common way is having your root zone, example.com, and making other projects DNS records on that zone, for example, if you host the internal app at Ipv4 1.2.3.4 then you would make the DNS record internal IN A 1.2.3.4 in your zone and then internal.example.com will resolve to your app
Edit: noticed you do not want to change the url - if the other site is running on its own server, then you would have to get the user to that server eventually, so if you did it the example.com/internal way you would have to 301 redirect to that ip which would end up changing the url anyway
I'm trying to figure out whether a website I use was hacked.
When I access the site via www.site-name.com, I'm taken to the website.
However, when I access the site without the "www," i.e. site-name.com, I'm taken to a different website.
Why is this happening? I did a little research and my only guess is that someone changed the site's .htaccess file, but that seems unlikely, as the different website has no relation to the official site.
Can someone help me understand what's going on here?
One IP address can host multiple websites with different hostnames using Virtual Name Hosting.
The HTTP server will look at the Host header in the request to determine what site to use for a given request.
This lets you have one IP address serving example.com and example.net.
Typically, the first Virtual Name Host will be the default, so if you were to ask for example.org the server would not recognise it and give you example.com instead.
In this case, it appears that the server has a Virtual Name Host configured for www.site-name.com but not for site-name.com so requests for site-name.com get the default site for the server.
I understand that if I want customers to be able to use a custom domain that points to their space at customer.mysaasapp.com, they must define a CNAME record that aliases the canonical customer.mysaasapp.com domain.
What I don't understand is how this alias persists across requests. For example, if the customer site links to its resources, how does it know whether to link to the customer.mysaasapp.com/videos domain vs the customclientdomain.com/videos resource? I don't want the true subdomain to show up in the navigation bar as soon as a link is clicked. How is this handled?
Let me try to explain it for you. As you already know CNAME are canonical names for another domain.
As you know when we hit a domain in browser address bar. Browser asks the DNS (domain name server) where to send the request. DNS matches the domain name and sends the IP address back to browser and browser hit those IP address to get the response.
But when we want multiple sites to be served from same IP address which is the case in SAAS app. We can define CNAME for each client. Which is alternative to IP mapping.
So when browser asks the DNS about the address for the provided host url. DNS sends back the actual domain name/path and tell's the browser that it's the right address to ask.
So now browser sends the request to actual domain behind the scene and sets the HOST header to the provided address which user entered. (customclientdomain.com/videos for your case).
Now the server knows which host was provided by the user and responds accordingly.
From next request onward Browser does the magic and give you a mimic that it's a totally new website.
All of the modern browser including WGET , CURL also handles this.
Here is a link with more details.
I have a complex web app at example-app.com, hosting fully on AWS using ELB and Route 53 for DNS. It's a Rails app.
I'm running an experiment that I'm using in the rails app, at example-app.com/test. I want to set up new-domain-app.com, to point at example-app.com/test, and have the URL cloacked to always be new-domain-app.com. It's a single page site, so it shouldn't require any navigation.
I'm having a lot of trouble figuring out how to set up my DNS on Route 53 to accomplish this. Does anyone have good ideas on what this Route 53 configuration should look like?
AWS offers a very simple way to implement this -- with CloudFront. Forget about the fact that it's marketed as a CDN. It's also a reverse proxy that can prepend a fixed value onto the path, and send a different hostname to the back-end server than the one typed into the browser, which sounds like what you need.
Create a CloudFront web distribution.
Configure the new domain name as an alternate domain name for the distribution.
For the origin server, put your existing hostname.
For the origin path, put /test -- or whatever string you want prefixed onto the path sent by the browser.
Configure the cache behavior as needed -- enable forwarding of the query string or cookies if needed and any headers your app wants to see, but not Host.
Point your new domain name at CloudFront... But before you do that, note that your CloudFront distribution has a dxxxexample.cloudfront.net hostname. After the distribution finishes setting up (the "In Progress" status goes away, usually in 5 to 20 minutes) your site should be accessible at the cloudfront.net hostname.
How this works: When you type http://example.com into the browser, CloudFront will add the origin path onto the path the browser sends, so GET / HTTP/1.1 becomes GET /test/ HTTP/1.1. This configuration just prefixes every request's path with the string you specified as the origin path, and sends it on to the server. The browser address bar does not change, because this is not a redirect. The host header sent by the browser is replaced with the hostname of the origin server when the request is sent to the origin.
What you are trying to do is not possible. Route53 is a DNS system, and you can not configure a hostname (e.g. new-domain-app.com) to point to URL (e.g. http://example-app.com/test) using DNS.
However, you are probably using a wrong tool for the job. If example-app.com/test is indeed a simple, static, single page site, then you do not need to host it inside Rails app. Instead, you can host it on AWS S3 bucket, and then you can point new-domain-app.com to that bucket using Route53.
See the following for details:
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/WebsiteHosting.html
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/RoutingToS3Bucket.html
DNS knows about Domains, not url's. DNS simply converts names to IP addresses.
You can't do what you are asking for just using DNS and ELB, however, what you can do is have a seperate VHOST for new-domain-app.com that points to your example-app.com site and accomplishes what you want using some sort of redirection rule that only fires for new-domain-app.com.
I'm not sure that this qualifies as an SO question, and more likely is a serverfault question. Specifics about your webserver and OS platform would be helpful in getting more specific advice.
So here's some details:
You already have example-app.com setup and working
You create a CNAME entry pointing new-domain-app.com to example-app.com or you can make an A record pointing to the same IP. If you already have example-app.com pointing to a different IP address, then use a subdomain (test.example-app.com) to isolate it.
Setup a new vhost on your server that basically duplicates the existing vhost for new-domain-app.com. The only thing you need to change is the server name configuration.
Why does this work? Because HTTP 1.1 included the HOST header that browsers send along, and web servers use in vhosting to determine which virtual host to route an incoming request to. When it sees that the client browser wanted "example-app.com" it routes the request to the appropriate vhost.
Rather than having to do some fancy proxying, which certainly can be used to get to a similar result, you can just add a redirection rule that looks for requests for the host example-app.com and redirects those to example-app.com. In apache that uses mod_rewrite which people often utilize by putting rules in the ubiquitous .htacess file, but can also be done in nginx and other common web servers. The specifics are slightly different for each.
Given the following URL: htttp://domain/index.php, where index.php is the main webpage in a joomla server. I want to get the URL with the IP format, http://IP/index.php. I've tried that with several Joomla servers without success. What is it happening?
I will try to keep this answer simple, yet understandable.
The relation between Internet domains and IP address is not necessarily one-to-one.
In shared hosting, a single IP address may be used by several domains (or hostnames).
A Host header, which is a part of the HTTP standard, is sent with the HTTP request. This allows the server to determine which site to serve.
When you are trying to access a domain for which you don't know the IP, DNS lookup is performed, which provides the requested IP address.
A HTTP request is then sent to that IP with a Host header with the hostname (which contains the domain name).
If you are trying to access the ip directly, for example by typing in a web browser's address bar, the value of the Host header will be the IP itself and the server will have no indication what domain you actually want.
It is possible to set up a default behavior for cases where the IP address is directly accessed, but it is highly likely that a shared host will not allow you to set it yourself.