How to use DNS to set a subfolder of one domain to redirect to another domain

Question

I have a situation where I need a subfolder, in one domain, to redirect to a second domain, so http://domain1.com/domain2/ would redirect to http://domain2.com.

I need the root folder of domain1.com to remain as it is, just the subfolder needs to redirect.

It needs to be this way because I need to access PHP and font files on domain 2, without violating cross-domain security. Is there a way to do this using DNS?

I only found instructions on doing this using subdomain, which I believe won't work for cross-domain PHP access.

Answer 1

This definitely can't be done with DNS.

I think the real question you want to solve is "How do I allow cross-domain PHP and fonts?"

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To enable cross-domain PHP and font files (this is probably all you need) you would add the 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header to domain2's configuration, like so

Apache:

Header add Access-Control-Allow-Origin "http://domain1.com"

Nginx:

add_header Access-Control-Allow-Origin "http://domain1.com";

If you do it this way you don't need http:/domain1/domain2 at all, get rid of it as it's confusing.

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If you actually want to permanently redirect domain1/subfolder > domain2 then it's a simple change in domain1's configuration like this.

Apache:

Redirect 301 /subfolder http://domain2.com

Nginx:

location /subfolder {
            return 301 http://domain2.com;
            }

Note that for both sets of answers, the Nginx directives need to be inside your server {...} blocks, and the Apache rules can go in your virtualhost config or in .htaccess (do yourself a favor and skip .htaccess if you can, put everything in your config/virtualhost for performance reasons). The Apache rules rely on mod_rewrite and mod_headers, which must be enabled.

Answer 2

This cannot be done via DNS. You either need to do it at the web server level (.htacess apache / rewrite rules IIS), or via a script that runs ASP.net, PHP, Perl etc. Essentially you need to change the response header to moved, and dns cannot do that.

Answer 3

You can only do this from DNS with a subdomain, not with subfolders. For subfolders, you need to do a proxy-pass - here's how it's done in Apache (version 2.4 and above):

ProxyRequests Off
ProxyPass /subfolder/ http://otherdomain.com/
ProxyPassReverse /subfolder/ http://otherdomain.com/
<Location /subfolder/>
    ProxyHTMLEnable On
    ProxyHTMLURLMap / /subfolder/
</Location>

You couls also use http://otherdomain.com:8080 if your second host serves the content on port 8080. Also, you need to have mod_proxy and mod_proxy_html enabled in your Apache server for this to work. The mod_proxy_html module is used to rewrite the links to your static resources (images, css, javascript etc.) so that if you have relative links in the response from otherdomain.com, for example, they would be loaded properly.

For older versions that don't have mod_proxy_html, you can try and use mod_substitute and some regular expressions magic to achieve the same result.