Redirecting subdomain to root index.php

Question

I am new to this. Here is the situation and I'm wondering if someone can suggest the best solution to it:

I have a domain "www.mydomain.com" where I have a Magento website running, we are in development stage so I did URL forwarding "www.mydomain.com" to "www.mydomain.net" and we have an under-construction page on "www.mydomain.net" because we do not want to show development.

I also have a subdomain "beta.mydomain.com" which I pointed to "www.mydomain.com/index.php" which works fine. But how can I show this without changing the URL in a browser from "beta.mydomain.com" to "www.mydomain.com/index.php"? This is in order to show our development to management.

Answer 1

If I understood your question correctly, a solution to your problem can be found in this Stack Overflow question. Assuming you're using a single Apache instance for all your sites, you can tell mod_rewrite that you're doing a rewrite instead of a redirect by removing the R flag from the RewriteRule:

# Example of internal redirect
RewriteRule (.+)$ "?url=$1" [L,R=301]

# Example of internal rewrite
RewriteRule (.+)$ "?url=$1" [L]

More info about rewrite vs. redirect in this thread. I believe the fact that you're using different domains (or domain/subdomain) will not be an issue, at least I haven't seen anything in the docs, but I'm not sure. Quote about absolute URLs:

If an absolute URL is specified, mod_rewrite checks to see whether the hostname matches the current host. If it does, the scheme and hostname are stripped out and the resulting path is treated as a URL-path. Otherwise, an external redirect is performed for the given URL. To force an external redirect back to the current host, see the [R] flag below.

Now, if you're using a different Apache instance for each site (or some other configuration - I assumed you're using Apache because of the htaccess tag) then I'm afraid I can't help you.

Answer 2

Why not use .htaccess and allow only people from your company network (IP's or domain) access to view the website?