domain redirection

Well, this is really a different feature: domain redirection. Aliases may be useful and desired in certain conditions (think of the domain module for example) so I wouldn't want to ditch that functionality.

But I agree that what we really want, by default, is redirection.

I'm not sure creating a separate vhost is necessary, however. I am thinking of something amongst those lines:

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName www.example.com
  ServerAlias example.com
  ServerAlias other.example.com
  RewriteCond ${HTTP_HOST} example.com [OR]
  RewriteCond ${HTTP_HOST} other.example.com [NC]
  RewriteRule ^/*(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [L,R=301]
</VirtualHost>

Heck, it could even be as simple as:

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName www.example.com
  ServerAlias example.com
  ServerAlias other.example.com
  RewriteCond ${HTTP_HOST} !^www.example.com$ [NC]
  RewriteRule ^/*(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [L,R=301]
</VirtualHost>

... ie. don't need to list every domain, just use a "not" (!).

That would be fairly simple to implement: a frontend module that would just add a checkbox to enable redirection and a backend module that would implement that hook I always forget the name to add stuff to the apache vhost.

Actually, this could be strapped on the alias module...

I support this feature.

We are looking at expanding the hosting_alias module to do this... ie if you have a site foo.example.com and you want to create the alias bar.com, with all traffic to foo.example.com redirected to bar.com. Any suggestions for the best way to implement this appreciated. I am in favour of moving the alias field out of the node form and into its own tab a la migrate etc

While re-reading the code to answer that last question, I figured that there *was* a conflict with the alias system... Currently, aliases include adding ServerAlias directives to the vhost (hardcoded in web_server/provision_apache_vhost.tpl.php, which are fed by the alias module in the frontend. That's fine *but* the backend also creates *symlinks* in sites/ for all the aliases. If we implement redirection, that will have to be turned off.

So what I think is this: the frontend alias module should have an extra "redirect" flag that turns the aliases into redirection (that would be in hosting_alias_form_alter()). That flag then would need to be passed to the backend (in hosting_alias.drush.inc). Then the backend needs to use that...

I'm just going to write up some patch for you to test, how is that? :)

So this is likely to slip past 0.3 (since we're in feature freeze), but here we go.

Had issues with the site verification after applying this patch

Could not change permissions sites/lolcows.pagebuild.net to 493 (chmod to 755 failed on sites/lolcows.pagebuild.net)
Could not change permissions sites/lolcows.pagebuild.net/files to 1528 (chmod to 2770 failed on sites/lolcows.pagebuild.net/files)

Also the patch implies (didn't get it working so can't be sure) that the alias will redirect to the master url. We are looking to do the reverse so an option to do that would be cool. Becomes problematic with more than one alias

Are you sure those issues are related with the patch? I think the problem you are describing is common in rc2, and is resolved by #529382: proper recursive functions for chmod/chgrp/chown and #203204: Uploaded files have the permissions set to 600.

ok.. I didn't have the file perms patch applied but I was using head of aegir so that is probably my issue. I will try again with the core patch applied

Hum, that's odd: I can reproduce your problem. It seems that automatic aliases work but manual aliases don't.

I reverted the patch and manual aliases did work, so I did something that broke manual aliases on the frontend (or the backend?).

I didn't mean to change the status here originally, but anyways, here's a reroll of the patchset, testing required again. Only the hosting part changed, so I'm just uploading this patch to avoid confusion, the provision patch is still valid.

This one was really hard to figure out, i was using db_result of db_fetch_array and got confused over that...

I like your approach better. What's also interesting is that having a separate vhost clarifies things... Furthermore, this should become the basis of the vhost engine: right now, all this is tightly coupled with the sites engine, while we may want to allow users to create arbitrary redirections and things like that. The SSL engine would use things like that too. So I support the idea of a separate vhost (and a separate file?).

See #541754: abstract away vhost engine for the vhost engine abstraction..

I've tried this manual method (as per realityloops suggestion) on my sites, and it works well.

I *think* i fixed this in git, I have updated the redirection branch in git. Here is a reroll of the patches. Please test

This will need to be ported now that the ports stuff hit the tree (fairly simple: we need to use the $site_port in the template instead of just "80"), see http://cvs.drupal.org/viewvc.py/drupal/contributions/modules/provision/w...

Committed. We'll see how it works.

I might be missing something, but I am re-opening this issue because the patches in #19 do not seem to be a complete solution. Specifically, the web_server/provision_apache_vhost_redirect.tpl.php file created by the http://drupal.org/files/issues/535098_redirection_provision_mig5.patch patch fails to handle cases where multiple aliases are entered by the user in the aegir site node edit form.

With the code in that patch, it appears to me that by using array_pop() on the $aliases array, only one redirect will be created (for the last alias entered into the field by the user). Other aliases are ignored and thus will not work.

Again, I could be missing something, because I applied these patches to aegir 0.3 (I am not using the 0.4 alpha).

Here is my code to fix the issue, using a foreach() around the template code so that a entry is created for each alias entered for the site (instead of just he last one). The only change is in provision_apache_vhost_direct.tpl.php which should be changed to:

(oops - posting as code got messed up due to the http:// stuff, will attach a file)

Here is the code for provision_apache_vhost_redirect.tpl.php