Sub domains

[bo0]

Hi,

Does anyone know how I should go about creating my own sub domain service in PHP?

Where a user types the sub domain which they want and the URL they want it to redirect it to.

Any ideas welcome!

Regards,
-Chris

[dalecosp]

Interesting question ... at least for me.

I'm considering letting PHP do some things for my nameserver, but haven't yet had time to hack at it.

What nameserver are you running?

[eriksmoen]

on your registrar, you will need to setup a wildcard subdomain. Then on your server, you will want to make the bind conf file writeable by php (which is always a potential danger). Then you will want to setup your apache config file. I have apache2 and here is a snippit from /etc/apache2/sites-available/default

ServerName YOURSERVERNAME.com
NameVirtualHost *

<VirtualHost * >
ServerName www.YOURSERVERNAME.com
ServerAdmin [e-mail]
DocumentRoot /home/YOURSERVERNAME/www
</VirtualHost>

and the stuff between the <VirtualHost></VirtualHost> tags are what you want PHP to add. but instead of www.YOURSERVERNAME.com for the repeated ones, it would be YOURSUBDOMAIN.YOURSERVERNAME.com. it's kindof a complicated mess to go into all the detail of configuring everything, and it also depends on the system and versions you use, so I won't go into detail about my setup because it would most likely render itself useless. But that's the basic jist of it.

[drew010]

a much simpler way would be to make a wildcard for you domain in bind, and then in your httpd.conf file, specify where * points to. that way you only need to make those two mods and you can have unlimited subdomains without having to add entries to your conf files.

i have tested out an example for you to make sure i got all the bind config and apache config correct.

//this is all i added to my /var/named/drew-phillips.com.db file
*     14400   IN      CNAME     drew-phillips.com.

//and i added this on top of my normal virtual host entry in httpd.conf
<VirtualHost 63.247.65.34>
ServerAlias *.drew-phillips.com
ServerAdmin [email][e-mail][/email]
DocumentRoot /home/drew010/public_html/scripted
User drew010
Group drew010
ServerName *.drew-phillips.com
User drew010
Group drew010
CustomLog domlogs/drew-phillips.com combined
</VirtualHost>

so once you have those two things in place, you have wildcards enabled. in the case of my virtualhost entry, all hits to whatever.drew-phillips.com, will read from /home/drew010/www/scripted/
so i made an index.php in /scripted and put this in it.

<?php
$domain = "drew-phillips.com";

preg_match("/(.*)\.$domain/i", $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'], $matches);

echo "You are viewing the subdomain <b>" . $matches[1] . "</b> right now.";
?>

and if you actually test it. http://phpbuilder.drew-phillips.com the php extracts the subdomain from the url.
and from that point, you can determine how you want to write your subdomain prog. i would guess when users sign up you save their subdomain name in the db, so when it is hit, you run a query from that page, retrieving the given url for the subdomain viewed and then redirect.

simple as that!