Dynamic subdomains on Mac os x

Question

Here is my ideal setup that I would like to figure out how to do:

I have a domain professionally hosted:

Example.net

I have a subdomain, home.example.net that points to my Mac mini at home. I've already got this working just fine. The document root for home.example.net is /Users/me/Sites

I want to setup dynamic subdomains such that anything that comes before home.example.net (the regex version: *.home.example.net) has the document root: /Users/me/Sites/$1

For example: visiting bacon.home.example.net will have the doc root /Users/me/Sites/bacon

How can I get this setup so I don't have to add a new vhost for every project?

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 02 '12 at 22:15

2

You need to enable mod_rewrite

a2enmod rewrite

and add a the following directives to your Apache configuration:

ServerAlias *.home.example.net

<Directory /User/me/Sites>
  RewriteEngine On
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^home\.example\.net
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^([^.]+).home\.example\.net
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://home.example.net/%1/$1 [L]
</Directory>

Of course you need to make sure that the DNS records and subdirectories for each subdomain exist.

answered Sep 02 '12 at 22:15

Ansgar Wiechers

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Is there anyway to bypass "making sure the DNs record exists"? How does one do that? – jshawl Sep 02 '12 at 22:42
Not unless you want to start managing `hosts` files. How is the browser supposed to resolve `foo.home.example.net` to an IP address without name resolution? – Ansgar Wiechers Sep 02 '12 at 22:50
1

If he's already mapping `*.home.example.net` to his localhost, that shouldn't matter – andy Sep 02 '12 at 23:03
You're right. I hadn't thought of wildcard DNS records. – Ansgar Wiechers Sep 02 '12 at 23:18
So just the mod rewrite will work then?! – jshawl Sep 02 '12 at 23:48
If `host SOMETHING.home.example.net` returns an address it should work, yes. – Ansgar Wiechers Sep 02 '12 at 23:50

Dynamic subdomains on Mac os x

1 Answers1