[UPHPU] wildcard DNS & web roots

[Alvaro Carrasco]

Wade Preston Shearer wrote:
> I am trying to set up wildcard DNS and web roots for developer 
> sandboxes, like this:
>
> *2.*1.dev.example.com ➞ /home/*1/sites/*2/htdocs/
> *2.*1.dev.example.com ➞ /home/*1/sites/*2/htdocs/
> *2.*1.dev.example.com ➞ /home/*1/sites/*2/htdocs/
>
>
> Where *2 is a project and *1 is a username, like this:
>
> www.jdoe.dev.example.com ➞ /home/jdoe/sites/www/htdocs/
> blogs.jdoe.dev.example.com ➞ /home/jdoe/sites/blogs/htdocs/
> test2.jdoe.dev.example.com ➞ /home/jdoe/sites/test2/htdocs/
>
>
> I have worked two different places previously where we had something 
> such as this set up. I did not do it myself though so I do not know 
> exactly what was involved. I am fairly certain that it was just done 
> with some regular expressions. I am getting resistance, from the team 
> that manages the servers that I am trying to get it implemented on 
> now, that it won't be possible because of missing modules and "a lot 
> of caveats" that come from said modules even if they were installed. 
> Does such a set up really require additional modules? Is it really 
> that complicated? Can't this just be done with regular expressions in 
> your DNS and in your httpd.conf?
>
> This is on linux servers running Apache.
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
The way to do that is with VirtualDocumentRoot using the mod_vhost_alias 
apache module:
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_vhost_alias.html

Alvaro