Redirecting to mobile subdomain in a CI applicatio

Question

I have a web app of which I would like to create a mobile version with jQuery Mobile. The existing application is built in CodeIgniter; I'll be using the same controllers, models where I can; (especially models since I'll be needing the same data anyway, might have to write new controllers).

I'm a bit confused as to how to get started. I want to put my mobile version on a subdomain (m.myhost.tld), however.. since my app is at www.myhost.tld and I don't feel like copying it all over to another folder and maintain two, I'm a bit confused.

I know I can use the User Agent library in CodeIgniter to detect mobile browsers and load views accordingly; I just don't know how to get this working with a subdomain. Do I need to customize my app/config/routes.php file here, or can I fix this with some .htaccess magic? I have next to none experience with .htaccess though. The only thing I know is how to remove my index.php from CI apps, and that's a copypasta snippet.

EDIT: I wonder if I can use a tutorial like this one to do what I want to do? It seems to be doing more or less the same thing, just with dynamic usernames instead of a simple 'm.'

EDIT 2: Some more information, I guess.

Say I detect mobile browsers using the User Agent library included with CodeIgniter. I want to direct these browsers to m.myhost.tld. However, the content that I want to display on the mobile website comes from a controller called mobile which I can also access through www.myhost.tld/mobile/; so my question is if there is a way to route a URL like.. for example www.myhost.tld/mobile/about to m.myhost.tld/about. I'm not even sure if this is possible, teehee. Still learning!

I'll be grateful for any advice you can give me. Thanks a lot!

Answer 1

If you want to share the same files in different hosts, you must assign the document root folder of your sites in your web server, this is an explanation for static files, but is the base to you understand.

browser -> host:z.y.xxx[ip.ip.ip.ip] -> web server -> read filesystem : document root + browser request path

so if your document root is:

/hosting/http/z.y.xxx/htdocs

and the request is /path-to-static/index.html the server try to read:

/hosting/http/z.y.xxx/htdocs/path-to-static/index.html

In conclution, you create the new host m.mysite.tld in your web server and you change the document root as the same of the you www.mysite.tld also you could use directives of host alias, like Apache ServerAlias directive. Have lot of documentation to how you could configure a web server.

You could handle the host name in php with $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] variable.

If you could specify more, I could help more.

have a nice day