Mask redirect to temporary domain with mod_rewrite

Question

We are putting up a company blog at companyname.com/blog but for now the blog is a Wordpress installation that lives on a different server (blog.companyname.com).

The intention is to have the blog and web site both on the same server in a month or two, but that leaves a problem in the interim.

At the moment I am using mod_rewrite to do the following:

http://companyname.com/blog/article-name redirects to http://blog.companyname.com/article-name

Can I somehow keep the address bar displaying companyname.com/blog even though the content is coming from the latter blog.companyname.com?

I can see how to do this if it is on the same server and vhost, but not across a different server?

Thanks

Answer 1

Rather than using mod_rewrite, you could use mod_proxy to set up a reverse proxy on companyname.com, so that requests to http://companyname.com/blog/article-name are proxied (rather than redirected) to http://blog.companyname.com/article-name.

Here are more instructions and examples.

Answer 2

There is functionality with ZoneEdit called webforwards which could probably do this and hide what you are actually doing (unless someone looked into it).

Answer 3

The only thing that mod_rewrite can do is send HTTP header redirects, and those redirects (across servers) always result in the browser address bar reflecting the reality.

You should instead consider writing a 404 script that 'reflects' the blog. This would essentially be a transparent proxy, and many are already written.

The script would find if the requested page (that was 404'd) started with http://mycompany.com/blog/ . If it did, it would download and then send onto the client the blog page and associated files (probably caching them as well).

So requesting http://mycompany.com/blog/article_xyz would cause the 404 script to download and send http://blog.companyname.com/article_xyz.

It's probably more work than it's worth, but you might be able to design a simple enough 404 script that it's worthwhile.