I really like Basecamp's idiom of "dynamically" creating custom virtual hosts for clients -- for instance, once a company has signed up they may quickly login to a special URL like:
https://mystartup.basecamphq.com/
--which I think is really neat, it segregates multiple organizations nicely within a single application. My question is: assuming I've got control of a given domain, is there an easy way to do this kind of black magic with Rails and Nginx -- that is, to dynamically create a virtual host?
How to do Basecamp-style subdomains in Rails
Also:
Subdomain accounts with Ruby on Rails explained
Most cases you are not truly creating a virtual host. You created a subdomain one time that then accepts ANY sub-domain off of it and you pipe it to your back end for processing (404, 302, or 200).
do a search on "nginx wildcard subdomain". The results from slicehost are usually very helpful.
Related
I have a Ruby on Rails application where my customers should ask their customers to go. But I would like to be able to hide/mask my own domain name from the url, so the customers of my customers don't feel like they are on a 3rd party website.
For example, if my domain name is:
https://app.example.com/visit/:customer_id
then what is my options for masking the example.com part?
If it is not possible to mask the domain name (I can see that even by using the IP address directly, https errors appear), then is it possible to put in some prefixes like e.g.:
https://prefix.app.example.com/visit/:customer_id
https://app.prefix.example.com/visit/:customer_id
https://app.example.prefix.com/visit/:customer_id
Btw, it's not important to keep the https security on these pages particularly, but I don't suppose it is possible to have an application that has both encrypted and non-encrypted pages?
your customers will have to setup their DNS to point to your application. you can use a CNAME to accomplish that. this can be done by using a subdomain.
if you use SSL/HTTPS you have to make sure that the certificates match the domain.
like #lassej already pointed out, an iframe is probably a better way of integration. it has several limitations though.
This is kind of weird but I'd like to serve multiple websites on the same domain. If possible, we want to avoid subdomains to keep urls simple for our users - no need for them to know it's two separate apps. This is purely for keeping the code bases separate. Any ideas?
For example:
Rails App 1 (Refinery CMS) serves:
http://example.com/
http://example.com/about
http://example.com/pricing
Rails App 2 (our real App) serves:
http://example.com/account
http://example.com/store
http://example.com/listings
We use ruby 1.9.2, ruby on rails, refinery cms, apache and passenger.
If you're using Passenger, check out the Deploying to a sub URI portion of the manual - it's quite simple to set up an app on a sub-URI. You may need to set config.action_controller.relative_url_root in your app configuration, as well.
Edit: I misread the question; not one app per URI, but one app serving some (but not all) endpoints. This is actually moderately easy to do with some basic rewrites, as well.
Deploy your Rails app to, let's say, /railsapp (but without setting relative_url_root). Now, in .htaccess:
RewriteRule ^account/(.*)$ railsapp/account/$1 [L]
This will internally remap /account/* to /railsapp/account/*, so as long as you set up a rewrite per path your Rails app handles, it should work fine.
Subdomains make it easier (thus why most sites have shop.example.com), but you could probably use rewrite rules with name based virtual host routing. How exactly to do that I'm not sure. More of a Apache rewrite question for SuperUser.
A word of warning if you are using SSL you might have issues arise.
You could set it up to first hit one app where you expect most URLs would work and if it 404s you could instruct it to try the other app next, though this will be slower than routing per route but it will work without having to hardcode a route for every page that is created on say, Refinery CMS.
Currently I'm also working on a same kind of CMS. In my case also I need multiple sub domains, like
www.test1.mydomain.com
www.test2.mydomain.com
www.test3.mydomain.com
www.test4.mydomain.com
here is what I did
in rails 3 (if you are on rails3) you can get the sub domain by using request object. (If you are on rails 2.x you can use sub domain_fu plugin)
In my case I have used a before filter to get the sub domain, after that I load the site according to the sub domain
For development use the following public domain "lvh.me"
http://tbaggery.com/2010/03/04/smack-a-ho-st.html
this was very useful for me http://railscasts.com/episodes/221-subdomains-in-rails-3
let users have their domains forwarded to your subdomain (with masking)
ex : www.clientdomain.com --> http://client.mydomain.com
hope this helps
cheers
sameera
The rails app I have allows users to manage holiday homes. Each property has it's own
"website/homepage" within my app and a user can tweak the content, it works well,
quite pleased so far. Typical rails approach to the resources so the URLs to a particular property look like this for the "homepage" of a particular property.
localhost:3000/properties/1/
then
localhost:3000/properties/1/full_details
localhost:3000/properties/1/price_list
etc
Requirement is to map a domain name e.g. www.chalet-yeti.com and have it resolve (rewrite?) to localhost:3000/properties/1/
like so also...
www.chalet-yeti.com/full_details -> localhost:3000/properties/1/full_details
The next user adds a property and I register a new name on their behalf and I'd like to do this of course..
www.apartment-marie.com -> localhost:3000/properties/2/
Is this possible/advisable/doable in the same rails app? So far solutions have ranged from "why would you do that" to variations on "use mod_proxy / mod_rewrite / virtual_host config". In case it matters the app runs under apache and passenger on my server.
I don't want to pre-empt an answer but most people so far seem to point to apache configuration and most say what I'm attempting is not impossible / inadvisable. Really hope someone could at least point me in the right direction as I've been head scratching all morning. Out of my comfort zone here and I'm hoping I can launch my app and haven't spent six weeks building a white elephant! Unless I can do this URL thing, it's dead!
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1512-how-to-do-basecamp-style-subdomains-in-rails
This is what you want. Don't mess with apache for that. It doesn't scale to hundreds of domains and it's prone to breakage.
Within Rails, you should think of the requests coming just to a URI, without a host name section. That is, instead of localhost:3000/properties/1/full_details you need to think of /properties/1/full_details. The localhost:3000 part is just to get the request to Mongrel during the development process.
So what you really want is to take the request as it is received by the HTTPd (Apache, in your case) and extract some information to construct the request which is given to Rails.
mod_rewrite, which is an Apache module, is the sane way to do this.
You need to ensure that the same virtual host which runs your Rails application accepts requests for all the domain names you're using.
Then you can use mod_rewrite to do something like this:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www.)?chalet-yeti\.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /properties/1/$1 [L]
This will take every request to the host chalet-yeti.com (or www.chalet-yeti.com) and hand them to Rails as "/properties/1/$1" (where the $1 is any additional path, like full_details).
You'll need a block like that for each of your domains, but that's just two lines in your Apache configuration. Unless you're doing hundreds of domains, it should be tolerable, right?
I have a rails app that is accessible through multiple URLs, I was wondering what is the best way to rewrite the URL to use the main domain name, abc.com.
I have a bunch of other domain names like
1kjsdf.info
2lksjdfs.info
3sldkjfds.info
... in total 50 of these kinds of domains.
They all end in info if that makes it easier. I used lighttpd as my webserver, is there a way to set things up so that when the user goes to 1kjsdf.info\profile, the url is rewritten as adc.com\profile?
You should probably do this in lighttpd, not Rails.
http://redmine.lighttpd.net/wiki/lighttpd/Docs:ModRewrite
It will be much faster to service these requests in the HTTP server before letting it get to Rails.
I'm looking at using ASP.NET for a new SaaS service, but for the love of me I can't seem to figure out how to do account lookups based on subdomains like most SaaS applications (e.g. 37Signals) do.
For example, if I offer yourname.mysite.com, then how would I use ASP.NET (MVC specifically) to extract the subdomain so I can load the right template (displaying your company's name and the like)? Can it be done with regular routing?
This seems to be a common thing in SaaS so there has to be an easy way to do it in ASP.NET; I know there are plugins that do it for other frameworks like Ruby on Rails.
This works for me:
//--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
public string GetSubDomain()
{
string SubDomain = "";
if (Request.Url.HostNameType == UriHostNameType.Dns)
SubDomain = Regex.Replace(Request.Url.Host, "((.*)(\\..*){2})|(.*)", "$2");
if (SubDomain.Length == 0)
SubDomain = "www";
return SubDomain;
}
I'm assuming that you would like to handle multiple accounts within the same web application rather than building separate sites using the tools in IIS. In our work, we started out creating a new web site for each subdomain but have found that this approach doesn't scale well - especially when you release an update and then have to modify dozens of sites! Thus, I do recommend this approach rather than the server-oriented techniques suggested above based on several years worth of experience doing exactly what you propose.
The code above just makes sure that this is a fully formed URL (rather, say, than an IP address) and returns the subdomain. It has worked well for us in a fairly high-volume environment.
You should be able to pick this up from the ServerVariables collection, but first you need to configure IIS and DNS to work correctly. So you know 37Signals probably use Apache or another open source, unix web server. On Apache this is referred to as VirtualHosting.
To do this with IIS you would need to create a new DNS entry (create a CNAME yourname.mysite.com to application.mysite.com) for each domain that points to your application in IIS (application.mysite.com).
You then create a host header entry in the IIS application (application.mysite.com) that will accept the header yourname.mysite.com. Users will actually hit application.mysite,com but the address is the custom subdomain. You then access the ServerVariables collection to get the value to decide on how to customize the site.
Note: there are several alternative implementations you could follow depending on requirements.
Handle the host header processing at a hardware load balancer (more likely 37Signals do this, than rely on the web server), and create a custom HTTP header to pass to the web application.
Create a new web application and host header for each individual application. This is probably an inefficient implementation for a large number of users, but could offer better isolation and security for some people.
You need to configure your DNS to support wildcard subdomains. It can be done by adding an A record pointing to your IP address, like this:
* A 1.2.3.4
Once its done, whatever you type before your domain will be sent to your root domain, where you can get by splitting the HTTP_HOST server variable, like the user buggs said above:
string user = HttpContext.Request.ServerVariables["HTTP_HOST"].Split(".")
//use the user variable to query the database for specific data
PS. If you are using a shared hosting you're probably going to have to by a Unique IP addon from them, since it's mandatory for the wildcard domains to work. If you're using a dedicated hosting you already have your own IP.
The way I have done it is with HttpContext.Request.ServerVariables["HTTP_HOST"].Split(".").
Let me know if you need more help.