[UPHPU] wildcard DNS & web roots

[Richard K Miller]

On Apr 24, 2008, at 3:00 PM, 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.

You shouldn't need to change the DNS to do this. If example.com is  
pointing to your server (perhaps it needs to be *.example.com) then  
Apache will listen for every request to any subdomain of example.com.  
Each VirtualHost can respond to a different subdomain.