CakePHP subdomains with htaccess

Question

I've used the following rules in my htaccess file in other applications to redirect users from a folder to a subdomain but load the content from that folder when accessing that subdomain.

# REWRITE SUBDOMAIN TO FOLDER
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^admin\.cameron\.com$
RewriteRule !^admin/? admin%{REQUEST_URI} [NC,L]

# REWRITE FOLDER TO SUBDOMAIN
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} \s/admin/([^\s]*) [NC]
RewriteRule ^ http://admin.cameron.com/%1 [R=301,L]

So if I go to: http://cameron.com/admin I end up on http://admin.cameron.com/

But the content is loaded from http://cameron.com/admin

However this doesn't work for CakePHP 2.x because of its rewriting apparently...

In my htaccess file in /app/webroot I have:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>

    RewriteEngine On

    # CAKEPHP RULES
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php [QSA,L]

    # REWRITE SUBDOMAIN TO FOLDER
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^admin\.cameron\.com$
    RewriteRule !^admin/? admin%{REQUEST_URI} [NC,L]

    # REWRITE FOLDER TO SUBDOMAIN
    RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} \s/admin/([^\s]*) [NC]
    RewriteRule ^ http://admin.cameron.com/%1 [R=301,L]

</IfModule>

If I go to: http://cameron.com/admin it just tries to load the AdminController and doesn't redirect you, and if I go to: http://admin.cameron.com/ I just get a 500 Internal Server Error.

Any ideas on how to get this working for CakePHP?

Answer 1

CakePHP and almost any other PHP framework parse $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] in order to route your request to particular controller

more info here: https://github.com/cakephp/cakephp/blob/2.6/lib/Cake/Network/CakeRequest.php#L230 ,

so you simply need to have the SAME request URI parameters for your redirect to get app working.

For your old location it was "/admin", for new location it should be the same, but you do not want to pass it, so it is better to change the task like this:

"When you go to admin.site.com you will be redirected to site.com/admin".

This can be done simply like this:

RewriteRule ^([^.]+)\.example\.com http://example.com/$1

It is not a working example of rule because you also need to rewrite subdomain's request URI to to get everything working and it depends on your requirements, but can be smth like this:

RewriteRule ^([^.]+)\.example\.com(.*) http://example.com/$1/$2

UPD: real example

$ cat app/webroot/.htaccess 
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
    RewriteRule ^ index.php [L]
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^admin.example.com
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.com/admin/$1 [P,L,NC]
</IfModule>