Custom URL's in a Rails App

Question

Hello Everybody,

This question is going to be very general because I do not know where to start. I want users of my service to be able to add their own custom url's. For example, www.[thierurl].com should be able to access their application's index and show pages.

I've seen apps like Tumblr offer this functionality for their front facing blogs. Although I have seen apps for Rails that implement sub domains in the way that Basecamp does but I have not found a resource for fully custom URL's.

P.S. I am talking in perspective of Rails 3

Any help/ideas would be appreciated! Thank You!

Answer 1

They'll need to create an A record in their DNS to point to your app servers IP. You'll need to know what domain they have pointed to your server and log it against their account, and also set your web servers config in such a way as to channel the requests from other domains to your app. You can then use the request object to look up their account in your application_controller.