How can I redirect subdomain to folder while main domain points to another folder?

Question

My very dear Stackoverflow community,

I have the following redirection problem and after several unsuccessful attempts I come here in search of enlightenment. My problem is the following. I have a domain, let's call it 'www.mydomain.com', and my 'public_html' directory has two folders as follows:

public_html

public_html/my_app/

public_html/my_other_app/

First, I would like that when typing the URL 'www.mydomain.com', I get redirected to the contents of folder 'my_app', while keeping the same URL. In fact this I have already accomplished, so whenever I type 'www.mydomain.com' I get redirected to 'www.mydomain.com/index.php', which actually corresponds to the 'public_html/myapp/index.php' script under 'myapp'.

Now I want to have a subdomain called 'other.mydomain.com', which has to redirect to contents of the 'my_other_app' folder, but I do not know how to make .htaccess work for this and at the same time work for the first case also.

So this is basically, the main domain redirects to one folder, and a subdomain redirects to another folder, and both folders are located under the public_html directory

Any hints more than welcome.

For your reference I post below my current .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On

# redirect to www prefix
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mydomain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.mydomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
# if start with www and no https then redirect
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.mydomain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.mydomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
# rewrite URL to trim folder
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/test/
RewriteRule ^$ /login [L,R=301]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ test/$1 [L]

This actually works for my main domain, it also rewrites the url to https. I need to add something in here in order to process separately the 'other.mydomain.com' and redirect to the '/my_other_app/' subfolder

Answer 1

what you need is a vhost (virtual host) per app. In the vhost, you will define the vhosts root directory, which will point to either of your sub directories.

There is IP based vhosts (one IP address per subdomain) or name based vhosts (the vhost is chosen based on the HTTP host header that all modern browser send). But there is too much to say about vhosts to write it all here, just read the apache documentation here:

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/vhosts/

I think with pure .htaccess files, you can't do that (I might be wrong). Normally you would add vhosts in the main apache config. Based on your hosting, this may not be possible. Talk to you hosting provider in that case.

Marc