Subdomain Mapping by Proxy

Question

Background

We are trying to map a subdomain to a regular EE template group, without changing the URL.

Assume that the 'natural' URLs to the templates would look something like this:

my-domain.com/group
my-domain.com/group/url-title

The desired subdomain set up would therefore look something like this:

group.my-domain.com
group.my-domain.com/url-title

The rewrite rule we have set up on the subdomain looks something like this:

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://my-domain.com/group/$1 [P]

which, as I understand, will proxy the request to the 'natural' URL.

The Problem

The problem we are having is that by the time the proxied request hits the server, the /group portion of the URL has been duplicated. So the request ends up looking something like this:

my-domain.com/group/group/url-title

which obviously doesn't work.

Debugging

• If I remove the [P] flag, the rewriting works correctly. (i.e. the request ends up looking something like my-domain.com/group/url-title).
• I have tried using other segments after the domain in the rewrite rule, (just fake ones e.g. /abc) and the same thing happens with them.

Could there be anything ExpressionEngine is doing to handle / map a request which could be affecting a proxied request?

Answer 1

Whilst I don't completely understand why it works, we do have a solution that works, so I thought I would post it here.

The rewrite rule now looks like this:

RewriteRule ^(?:group)?(.*) http://my-domain.com/group/$1 [P]

which correctly redirects as expected.