This is rather difficult to explain so please bear with me.
We will be hosting 4 websites on our server and the plan is to have each site sit under its own domain:
site-a.com
site-b.com
sub1.site-b.com
sub2.site-b.com
Notice the two sub domains!
However, our client has asked if we can implement the following url structure instead of using subdomains:
sub1.site-b.com BECOMES site-b.com/sub1/
sub2.site-b.com BECOMES site-b.com/sub2/
Does this make sense so far??? So we are using forward slash as opposed to sub domains.
Can you advise on the best way to achieve this please?
Thanks for any help!
Dave.
Use Apache to remap the domains. It's probably your webserver, so it's probably the answer.
The docs are here:
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/mod/mod_alias.html#redirect
Match your subdomain and redirect to the appropriate folder, copying and carrying over the query string as appropriate.
JQuery probably won't help you.
This will depend on your hosting situation.
In IIS you can setup virtual directories for this type of behaviour.
You could also use JavaScript or server side redirects in sub1, sub2 etc folders.
Related
In IIS I want to deploy a sub application in a website. I really don't want to bother with having to update the root website's web.config with location tags all over the place.
Is it possible to direct the sub application to just totally ignore the root website's web.config?
Okay, so that's my question. The following is just additional information that could lead someone to offer an alternate solution I haven't thought of but if possible I hope you won't judge my post on the following since, as I mentioned, the above is my question... this is just extra information for the interested:
I am deploying several websites. Each website will have an admin application which will have the same codebase. I want the admin application to be available at site1.com/admin, site2.com/admin, etc.
In the past I did something similar on another project, but instead of having sub apps I did sub domains to another site... so it would have been like site1.admin.com, site2.admin.com, etc. Nice thing about this solution was the ease of just adding additional bindings for any new site (and the application would look at host name to apply proper theming, configuration, security, etc.). I would have preferred this solution again but it just won't work this time because we can't easily secure a proper domain name for that purpose and aside from that we would prefer the user stay on the same domain name anyway just from a marketing perspective.
So ultimately my goals are:
Have the web address be "sitename.com/admin"
Only deploy the admin application to one location
Avoid spending 2 days trying to figure out how to properly configure everything so that configs don't clash and then still end up with a
few errors I spontaneously find over the course of the next week and
eventually find one that requires me to reprogram a large section of
code in order to play nicely with the root website. (If you can't
tell, I may have minor PTSD from trying something like this a couple
years back).
I mean, what would be really super is if I could have admin be its own web application and have bindings like "site1.com/admin" and "site2.com/admin" but obviously that's not possible. But maybe there are some other straightforward solutions I haven't thought of yet?
Example:
You know the site about.com ?
They have a whole subset of url's such as: pottery.about.com
My question: How to get the "pottery" in front of the URL?
Anybody have some nifty mod_rewrite to do this?
Thanks!
David
Those are considered sub domains, you can set them up most of the time through any hosting company. Usually they dont charge you for them, but some do. They are very easy to setup and can be done quickly versus regular domain names.
I'm creating a rails app where users will be able to create and manage multiple blogs from their accounts. The app will be hosted on www.mydomain.com but i want users to specify a domain they own and be able to point it to any of the blogs they've created so that they can have www.usersite.com point to www.mydomain.com/user/:user_id/blog/:blog_id
that way it looks like is being hosted on their site even though is not
i've been reading some post and maybe CNAME is the way to go for this, but i'm pretty new to creating rails apps and if anyone can help me or point me in the right direction i would appriciate it.
If you need me to clarify anything please let me know
Thanks in advace
danny
As far as I understood your question is more about DNS rather than Rails.
I could suggest you Bandcamp as a live example.
There's some tips:
Using CNAME (and I pretty much sure there's no other options) You should provide every user with his own unique subdomain i.e. user.mydomain.com in your case. Quick googling and we find out that there's a solution for Rails 3 — http://bcardarella.com/post/716951242/custom-subdomains-in-rails-3
You should provide them with step-by-step manual how exactly they can modify their domain DNS entries and add CNAME record. It's up to them. You or Your app can't do it. Again, Bandcamp is a great example — http://bandcamp.com/faq_custom_domains
And then you win.
I am looking at implementing URLMapping for a personal project. I am already aware that solutions exist so please do not answer suggesting I should use one.
What I want is to harvest the opinions of fellow developers and web users on URL mapping implementations. Specially I would like you to answer:
Which is your favourite implementation?
What do you like about your favourite implementation?
What do you not like about your favourite implementation?
How would you improve it?
I would like you to answer from two points of view:
As a developer
As a user
I would be grateful for any opinions on this matter, thanks!
I've only worked with django's URLConf mechanism. I think the way it relies on the urlpatterns variable is a bit flimsy, but I like its expressiveness in specifying patterns and dispatching to other url configurations. I think probably the best thing is to figure out your URL scheme first, and then try out a couple of solutions to see what matches best. If you're going hard-core REST using the full complement of GET/POST/PUT/DELETE, and checking the user agent's Accept headers, and all that, django will, by default, have you splitting your logic between URL config files and view files, so it might not be the cleanest solution.
However, since it's all Python, you might be able to do some more complex processing before you assign to urlpatterns.
Really, you want a system that does what you need. Your URL scheme is your API, so don't compromise on it based on the tools you use. Figure out your API, then find the tools that will let you do that and get out of your way.
Edit: Also do a google search for "URL scheme design." I found this without much effort: http://www.gaffneyware.com/urldesign.htm. Not comprehensive, but some good advice gotten from looking at what flickr does.
Well, I should have noticed the url-routing tag shouldn't I? :-) Sorry about that.
jcd's experience mimics mine - Django is what I use too.
I like the fact that the routes for an app reside within the app (in urls.py) and can just be included into any projects that might make use of that app. I am comfortable with regular expressions, so having the routes be specified in regex doesn't phase me (but I've seen other programmers scratch their heads at some more uncommon expressions).
Being able to reverse a route via some identifier (in Django's case by route's name) is a must. Hardcoding urls in templates or controllers (view in Django) is a big no-no. Django has a template tag that uses the reverse() method
The one thing I wish I could do is have the concept of default routes in django (like Rails does or even Pylons). In Django every route has to map to a view method, there is no concept of trying to call a certain view based on the URL itself. The benefit is that there are no surprises - your urls.py is the Table of Contents for your project or app. The disadvantage is that urls.py tend to be longer.
I'm a student of web development (and college), so my apologies if this comes off sounding naive and offensive, I certainly don't mean it that way. My experience has been with PHP and with a smallish project on the horizon (a glorified shift calendar) I hoped to learn one of the higher level frameworks to ease the code burden. So far, I looked at CakePHP Symfony Django and Rails.
With PHP, the URLs mapped very simply to the files, and it "just worked". It was quick for the server, and intuitive. But with all of these frameworks, there is this inclination to "pretty up" the URLs by making them map to different functions and route the parameters to different variables in different files.
"The Rails Way" book that I'm reading admits that this is dog slow and is the cause of most performance pains on largish projects. My question is "why have it in the first place?"? Is there a specific point in the url-maps-to-a-file paradigm (or mod_rewrite to a single file) that necessitates regexes and complicated routing schemes? Am I missing out on something by not using them?
Thanks in advance!
URLs should be easy to remember and say. And the user should know what to expect when she see that URL. Mapping URL directly to file doesn't always allow that.
You might want to use diffrent URLs for the same, or at least similar, information displayed. If your server forces you to use 1 url <-> 1 file mapping, you need to create additional files with all their function being to redirect to other file. Or you use stuff like mod_rewrite which isn't easier then Rails' url mappings.
In one of my applications I use URL that looks like http://www.example.com/username/some additional stuff/. This can be also made with mod_rewrite, but at least for me it's easier to configure urls in django project then in every apache instance I run application at.
just my 2 cents...
Most of it has already been covered, but nobody has mentioned SEO yet. Google puts alot of weight on the URL itself, if that url is widgets.com/browse.php?17, that is not very SEO friendly. If your URL is widgets.com/products/buttons/ that will have a positive impact on your page rank for buttons
Storing application code in the document tree of the web server is a security concern.
a misconfiguration might accidentally reveal source code to visitors
files injected through a security vulnerability are immediately executable by HTTP requests
backup files (created e.g. by text editors) may reveal code or be executable in case of misconfiguration
old files which the administrator has failed to delete can reveal unintended functionality
requests to library files must be explicitly denied
URLs reveal implementation details (which language/framework was used)
Note that all of the above are not a problem as long as other things don't go wrong (and some of these mistakes would be serious even alone). But something always goes wrong, and extra lines of defense are good to have.
Django URLs are also very customizable. With PHP frameworks like Code Igniter (I'm not sure about Rails) your forced into the /class/method/extra/ URL structure. While this may be good for small projects and apps, as soon as you try and make it larger/more dynamic you run into problems and have to rewrite some of the framework code to handle it.
Also, routers are like mod_rewrite, but much more flexible. They are not regular expression-bound, and thus, have more options for different types of routes.
Depends on how big your application is. We've got a fairly large app (50+ models) and it isn't causing us any problems. When it does, we'll worry about it then.