CNAME my website's users' custom domain to their subdomains of my domain ?

anjanesh · Jan 18, 2023

Lets say I wanted to setup a website at myWeb.com where users can map their user-pages to subdomains like jack.myWeb.com and jill.myWeb.com

If jack wants his user-page to be mapped to his own domain jack.com and jill wants to do the same at jill.com., what would they need to do ? CNAME jack.com to jack.myWeb.com and CNAME jill.com to jill.myWeb.com ?

Is this all ? Straightforward ?

sean · Jan 18, 2023

anjanesh you can't create CNAMEs on apex domains.

For this to work your app will need to route the custom domains to their respective user sites, ie check the Host header and route accordingly.

anjanesh · Jan 18, 2023

Do you have any references / links to do this in PHP ? - I am some difficulty in getting the right search terms for googling.

sean · Jan 18, 2023

anjanesh I do not have any reference. What type of application is it?

anjanesh · Jan 18, 2023

Lets say I wanted to build a PHP version of blogger.com - now my blog is at
lghwggqix3exhrwdlpeextsgu3htx7ya0ls.blogspot.com
for which my custom domain code.anjanesh.net is CNAMED to ghs.google.com

This is what I want to achieve in a PHP application.

sean · Jan 18, 2023

anjanesh in PHP you can get the host header from $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].

The rest of it is up to you, you'll need to have some sort of data structure linking hostnames to users so that you can then serve whichever user's content for a given hostname. You'll probably also need to hook into our API to route the user domains to your site.

anjanesh · Jan 19, 2023

Thanks for your response Sean - somehow I thought CNAME was the way to go.

sean · Jan 19, 2023

anjanesh you can still point subdomains at your Opalstack site subdomain with CNAMES, but since we use name-based virtual hosting in our Nginx setup the CNAME subdomains have to be routed to your site like any other domain or subdomain.