Internal redirection: Serve “/site” as “/” and “/sub/blog” as “/blog”

Question

I have a website with a shared hoster. There are a few things that I have there, like main site, Piwik, a blog and other standalone things.

Right now I have the following structure:

• ~/subs/www gets served as example.org and www.example.org
• ~/subs/blog gets served as blog.example.org
• ~/subs/app/piwik gets served as app.example.org/piwik
• ~/subs/app/foo gets served as app.example.org/foo

This is a all nice, I have separate cookies for the different applications. However, I would need a wildcard TLS certificate in order to get everything encrypted. Especially since Piwik is included in the main page, it must also be served over a secure connection. The provider wants 10 EUR/month for the wildcard certificate.

Now they offer one free certificate which I have issued for example.org and getting www.example.org for free. In consequence I would have to serve everything from example.org in order to get consistent TLS.

From a user standpoint, I would like to have the following URLs:

• / is the main site
• /blog is the blog
• /app/piwik points to the Piwik installation
• /app/foo points to some other stand-alone application

I do like the directory structure on the server, especially since I can just rsync --delete into the ~/subs/www directory and automatically prune files that I have deleted on disk. If I would upload the files such that they get served correctly, I would not do this any more.

So I would like to do this:

• ~/subs/www is served at example.org/
• ~/subs/blog is served at example.org/blog
• ~/subs/app/piwik is served at example.org/app/piwik

From this question I gathered that the following .htaccess should do the trick:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/subs/
RewriteRule ^blog(.*) /subs/blog$1 [L]

However, when I request example.com/blog in my browser, I get redirected to example.com/subs/blog. I don't want to redirect, I want to do this mapping in the background such that the visitor will never see the URL fragment /subs/.

The shared hoster is Domain Factory, I can put in .htaccess files but I cannot alter any configuration files that need root access to the system.

How can achieve this?

Answer 1

From what i gather, try this :

RewriteRule ^blog$ /subs/blog [L]

and save it in your roots (www) folder's .htaccess

But i believe that your best bet would be to do a direct redirection such as

Options +FollowSymLinks
Redirect ~/subs/blog/ http://www.yourdomain.com/blog/$1