[howto] hostname.domain.com goes to specific page

It is rather neat -once you have your own domain to have some subdomains for different purposes. A usefull subdomain might for example be downloads.example.com. Any user will understand what one can expect at such a domain.

Things like this can be done with drupal 4.3 in the core or in 4.2 with the path module. In that case you can point your users to example.com/downloads and this page drupal will rewrite towards the download page. The way of rewriting these domains is rather neat, but having subdomains might in certain case have a better image or be more usefull.

The site drupal.org uses the shortcut hostname.example.com as well. For example to the documentation place, http://documentation.drupal.org leads to http://www.drupal.org/node.php?id=253 (mhhh, we should use the new clean url here!).

So how can you use this service? What follows is a short howto.

Say you own the domain example.com (rfc2606);

Say you have a drupal page example.com/node/view/nid

You want to have a shortcut to this page labelled nid.example.com

Now you have to do the following things:

1. Edit your DNS

2. Edit your .htaccess

Regarding 1), editing your DNS

I wont explain how DNS works, but if you have basic knowledge of DNS and adminster one or more domains, you should be able to add a hostname in your zone called nid(.example.com.). Please make sure you update the TTL.

Another way of doing this is by adding a wildcard in your domain. This wildcard (*) makes that any hostname in your domain will automatically be resolvable. Now wildcards for toplevel domains might be considered very bad (see the rants against verisigns sitefinder service), I think having one in a domain is not *that* bad.


Note that there is one very big disadvantage of having all hostnames resolved. Any word (and i do mean any word) will point to your site, if you like the word or not. Together with the standard drupal behavior of not generating an error pages (e.g. a 404 page), this can lead towards very undesired results. For example http://i-think.drupal.org/rocks will give a valid page, as well as less flatering ones...

Regarding 2) edit hour .htaccess

Once you edited your zone with the new hostname and you tested from various places that this hostname resolves towards the right IP adress, you can edit your .htaccess file in the root of your webserver. This assusmes you are using apache.

First make sure that you have mod_rewrite enabled in your apache webserver. There are more ways to make sure you have mod_rewrite as a module enabled in your webserver, an easy way is to make a small php file somewhere in your document root with
<? phpinfo() ?>

Now surf towards this php file and search for mod_rewrite in the page. If this module is not enabled, ask your hosting party or download the module your self and enable it.

Once you have mod_rewrite installed we can edit the .htaccess file in the root of your webdirectory. Start your favourite editor and check if the line
RewriteEngine On
is there. If not, add the line.

Now add the folowing entrys:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^nid\.example\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.com/node/view/nid [R=301,L]

Surf towards your new subdomain nid.example.com and see if you are going to example.com/node/view/nid. Check the error log in case things fail, you dont even have to restart the webserver.

Having shortcuts this way can be very handy for taxonomy

Hope you enjoy your new shortcut! Have fun.