Subdomains can be a very handy way to make your urls more friendly looking. They can also be incredibly useful for membership driven websites to allow members to have their own custom subdomain. But how do make manage dynamic subdomains with PHP?
There is two parts to making dynamic subdomains work in this case. The first is updating your DNS and webserver to expect wildcard requests. On the DNS side its a simple matter of adding * as an ‘A’ record, or cname pointing to the primary domain or IP. In most cases if you are using shared hosting, you’ll need to contact your hosting provider to enable wildcard DNS on your account. Otherwise if you are on a dedicated server or virtual private server, this can be most likely handled by yourself, such as editing the DNS zone in WHM.
Once you have enabled wildcard DNS, you’ll need to configure your webserver to expect a *.domain.com request. Otherwise it will ignore all requests other than the base domain and pre-defined subdomains.
In Nginx simply modify the server_name directive:
server_name yourdomain.com *.yourdomain.com;
In Apache you would add a ServerAlias directive to the appropriate virtual host entry.
ServerAlias *.yourdomain.comOn most Cpanel driven servers the http.conf file for Apache can be found in /usr/local/apache/conf.
Once you have configured both the name server and web server for wildcard requests you can now use php to not only detect the provide subdomain, but also generate them. The code below will obtain the subdomain being visited.
$sub = str_replace(".yourdomain.com", "", $_SERVER["HTTP_HOST"]);
The above will simply take the hostname stored in the HTTP_HOST enviroment variable, and attempt to replace the base domain with nothing (if no subdomain was provided all that remains is the base domain).
Once the subdomain is determined, you can filter out requests either with an if/then block or in a switch/case statement. In the event of using memeber names as subdomains you can use a switch statement to make sure that the subdomain doesn’t match the homepage (www / yourdomain.com) or a reserved page name such as register.yourdomain.com and assume anything else must be a member name. With that information you can pull the members information from a file or database.
Using PHP to handle the subdomain is certainly easier for most novice as opposed to modifying an htaccess to do rewrite rules passing the subdomain off as a query (which takes more resources than str_replace) or having to modify the webservers configuration file, especially if you do not have direct access to the webserver’s configuration file or do not have override permission.
If your current hosting provider does not support wildcard subdomain, and you are running a memeber based site, consider upgrading to a Virtual Private Server or use a shared hosting provider such as HostGator that allows you to turn on such capability via a support ticket.