How can I use "mod rewrite" to redirect a folder path to a subdomain, but without a browser redirect?

Question

I have a file that I want to redirect to a subdomain using mod_rewrite. For example, I would like to redirect the request for http://www.mydomain.com/xyz to the subdomain xyz.example.com

I don't want to send a redirect to the browser though (so it doesn't know the page is different).

BTW. xyz is a CNAME record, pointing to www.otherdomain.com.

Another example, just to clarify. If http://www.mydomain.com/xyz/something is entered into the browser, I want Apache to return the contents of http://xyz.mydomain.com/something

Answer 1

I THINK this will do what you want it to:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(.*?)/(.*?)$ http://$1.mydomain.com/$2

As this stands it will redirect EVERY request that goes to a subfolder so if you links for images or css that are in a sub folder it will also rewrite those, if you want to list only certain things you could use this

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(blog|store|other)/(.*?)$ http://$1.mydomain.com/$2

This will only redirect mydomain.com/blog/ mydomain.com/store/ and mydomain.com/other/

Answer 2

If both domains are on the same machine and accessible over the filesystem, you should go this way. For example:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?example\.com$
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/(.*) /absolute/path/to/subdomains/$1/$2

If this is not the case, you’ll need a proxy:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?example\.com$
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/(.*) http://$1.example.com/$2 [P]

These examples are inteded for a .htaccess file. If you want to use them in the httpd.conf, prefix the RewriteRule patterns with a /.