Plesk WordPress Multisite Install with Non-www Domains

Question

I'm trying to do something that's pretty straight-forward in cPanel, but I wish to use Plesk instead. I'd like to create a WordPress multi-site install and point various domains and sub-domains to it. Here are examples:

www.mymaindomain.com
test.mymaindomain.com
www.newdomain.com
multi.anotherdomain.com

In cPanel, it's pretty painless:

1. Create a WordPress multi-site install under www.mymaindomain.com
2. Point the domains to cPanel's IP address in DNS
3. Add sub-domains (eg test.mymaindomain.com) and addon domains (eg multi.anotherdomain.com) and point them to the folder of the install.
4. Within WordPress multi-site, add the new sites, 1 for each domain/subdomain pointed.

It's similar in Plesk. However, the complication comes when trying to point non-www domains that are not sub-domains of the main domain (eg multi.anotherdomain.com) to the site. Plesk doesn't have 'Addon' domains like cPanel. Instead it has 'Domain Aliases' where it forces you to use a www domain.

I'm not finding any good simple instructions for this in Plesk. Are there any?

Answer 1

If you know the differences between cPanel and Plesk, the answer is straight-forward. Basically, if you want to point a subdomain to a subscription (ie one group of domains) for a WordPress multi-site, then even if the main domain isn't pointing to the server, you still need to add it first, then create the subdomain after that and point it to the httpdocs folder of the main subscription domain.

Answer 2

Although it is an old question, I will answer this because the situation has not changed since then.

cPanel's "add-on domain" is the same thing with "alias domain" in Plesk, however, Plesk does not support adding an alias for subdomains. See this KB article: https://www.plesk.com/kb/support/how-to-add-an-alias-for-subdomain-in-plesk-for-linux/

In the same article they also provide two work arounds one of which involves only adding a top level domain as an alias to a subdomain. The second work around however doesn't have this limitation. You can add extra directives for Apache and nginx to Plesk configuration of that domain like;

For Apache:

ServerAlias subdomain.example.com
ServerAlias example.com
ServerAlias www.example.com

For nginx:

server_name subdomain.example.com
server_name example.com
server_name www.example.com

If you are using nginx as a proxy to Apache, then you will most probably need to do both. The downside is that you won't see anything about these aliases in any place of Plesk and nothing is configurable about them from the GUI.