How to point all subdomains to index.php [closed]

Question

I'm trying to host a site on which user profile pages come with unique subdomains, such as username.sitename.com. I would like an Apache/VirtualHost solution for pointing *.sitename.com to sitename.com/index.php, where I could assort, which subdomain comes with a profile page and which would show 404 error.

Please help me setting up the .htaccess

Answer 1

You need only a correct VirtualHost setup.

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName example.com 
  ServerAlias *.example.com

  [...] 

</VirtualHost>

As the index.php is in the DirectoryIndex it is called automatically, regardless which domain is called. Do dynamically react you have acces to the requested host trough the $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] variable.

Answer 2

It's best to do this with a 301 redirect at the server level in the httpd.conf file (or an included config file). Rather than creating a VirtualHost and making the server answer and filter with an .htaccess file for each domain, you can setup the redirect in the VirtualHost itself.

You can do this with mod_rewrite

<VirtualHost *>
  ServerName subdomain.example.com
  RewriteEngine on
  RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ http://example.com/index.php [L,R=301]
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *>
  ServerName subdomain2.example.com
  RewriteEngine on
  RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ http://example.com/404.php [L,R=301]
</VirtualHost>

or if you're running mod_alias you can use this:

<VirtualHost *>
  ServerName subdomain.example.com
  Redirect 301 / http://example.com/index.php
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *>
  ServerName subdomain2.example.com
  Redirect 301 / http://example.com/404.php
</VirtualHost>