Domain Aliases

[Lonkle]

@girish said in Domain Aliases:

@Lonk The closest we have is https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/3205/what-s-coming-in-6-0-take-2 . We only plan from one release to the next. From what we have seen, anything more "forward" looking gets obsolete/out of date very quickly. This is why I also proceeded to remove many of the WIP tags in apps. We had 14 previously, it was not a reflection of reality. It's now down to 2 or so now and it is much closer to what we are actually working on coming few weeks (this doesn't take into account all the unstable apps we have pushed out - weblate, calibre, dolibarr, moodle etc which still require work to become stable).

That makes sense. But I do hope domain aliases make the cut. They’re the one thing holding me back! And yes, this is me holding back.

[Lonkle]

@girish I was wondering, since this is the only reason I haven't ported my Wordpress installation over yet - are domain aliases still being considered for 6.0? For me it's for Wordpress Multisite, for everyone else it's to solve the mail alias issue (I don't know the mail system, but I know this was a solution from it from @marcusquinn's comment).

[girish]

@lonk It's too late for Cloudron 6 (which is due in 2 weeks from now). We can think about it for the release after.

[Lonkle]

@girish said in Domain Aliases:

@lonk It's too late for Cloudron 6 (which is due in 2 weeks from now). We can think about it for the release after.

Awesome, I’ll numb this thread in a month or two then. ️

[Lonkle]

Found these posts:
https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/2202/multi-domain-for-the-same-app-such-as-nextcloud
and
https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/2201/domain-alias-not-redirect/4?_=1606813384424

Just to consolidate all the opinions about this request. I think 6.0 was delayed. But I'll post back here after 6.0.

[Lonkle]

@girish You ready to tackle this yet? I'll help and / or even write the code (it's just a new domain "type" in box's very simple database and then, based on that new type, routing the logic differently through NGINX which I begrudgingly dealt with too often with the VPN Client). You'd mentioned wanting to discuss it after 6.0 was out so I thought I'd bring it up as it's the honestly the only thing keeping me from switching to Cloudron.

[girish]

@lonk Sure. I already put out the feature list for 6.1, it's mostly minor things (given holiday, I doubt anything gets done this coming two weeks). So we can do this in the release after that.

Also, this posts says Domain Aliases as the topic heading. This can mean WP multisite support and/or also email domain aliases. Both features are quite different and the latter requires more work. I wouldn't work on domain aliases at the moment. For multisite, please go ahead. If you can make a rough patch and we can move things forward. I guess we inject env vars CLOUDRON_APP_DOMAIN1, CLOUDRON_APP_DOMAIN2 + configure reverse proxy + app deals with it?

[Lonkle]

@girish I forgot this also meant email domain aliases. So, I'll only be working on regular domain aliases for the purpose of WP Multisite Support at some point after the holidays! I'll submit a PR for the feature for you to test. I'll wait till the release of 6.1 to do so, just because I like working on the latest codebase and you'll likely be done with 6.1 by the time I start work on this. ️ Thanks for the go ahead!

Note, if I'm going to be coding Domain Aliases, I'll also be doing a PR for Wordpress (Managed) and Wordpress (Developer) to explicitly tie the Multisite Support together (using the WP CLI to detect if a site is a multisite and adjusting the WP Cron script slightly to account for that, as well as automatically upgrading multisite database tables on WP core updates).

[Lonkle]

@girish Wanted to make sure nothing has changed on your end on this feature request, I may find time to squeeze this feature in there when I update my OpenVPN Client code for 6.0. Depends on how difficult it is, but just seems like a slight nginx and a new database entry for aliases. Looks like the UI only has to change slightly as we only need to add "alias" as an option in the Locations tab.

[jimcavoli]

I realize it would break backwards compatibility, but I'm of the mind that aliasing a domain name should be the default and that redirects should be the opt-in. So an app called xyz.cloudron.example with a second location of abc.cloudron.example would be an alias that resolves abc.cloudron.example straight into the xyz.cloudron.example container's web port, and having the option to check a box or something to make an alias like def.cloudron.example redirect so that name when resolved does the 3xx redirect to xyz.cloudron.example. Whichever is the default is fine, I suppose, but that would strike me as more intuitive. Plus, the iconography is a lot easier (various arrow graphics indicate redirect more commonly than any other symbol indicates "not redirect").

[girish]

@jimcavoli Most apps don't support having them hosted on more than one domain. I think WordPress is just very special in this regard. For example, most of the config files of apps only allow setting a single domain name. I assume that the domain name is used in places, otherwise why ask for it all. And since it's used but they only allow for one, I can only assume that most apps don't support more than one domain. I haven't tested it of course, but just guessing from all the config files I have seen

[jimcavoli]

@girish Makes enough sense to me!

[Lonkle]

@girish Would a checkbox to make a domain a Location an "alias" instead of a "redirect" work for you then? Or would you rather I go in a different direction UX wise?

[girish]

@lonk I guess another section named "Alias" would be a good start (just like Redirections).

Is the multi-site WP app already available somewhere? I would think that is probably the biggest showstopper here and not the UI changes itself.

[Lonkle]

@girish said in Domain Aliases:

@lonk I guess another section named "Alias" would be a good start (just like Redirections).

Is the multi-site WP app already available somewhere? I would think that is probably the biggest showstopper here and not the UI changes itself.

There is no "Multisite Wordpress" Version. Multisite is just a feature inside of Wordpress (I set it up on Wordpress Developer very easily). It's a flick of a switch in the Wordpress app, it converts it's database into a multi-blog / multisite DB. Once the DB is converted tho, it can't be reverted to single site.

So, the only show stopper is the fact that another blog within a multisite uses another domain name and Wordpress itself does the routing so with Redirections, there's no way to access any other subsite in your installation because Wordpress is never given the real URL of which to route to.

Does that make sense? That's why Domain Aliases are the only thing needed for this. I have plenty of quality of life changes I've pre-built (which are really just slight additions to the startup script to account for multiple sites so all features work for all sites but 95% of the features work out of the box rn). But without Domain Alias Support even my slight startup script updates to account for multisite (which are outlined in the multisite thread), this feature actually is the show stopper (not the UI of course, but the routing logic) since multisite literally can't work without it (there is a way to use subdirectories, but most don't choose to do that - I'm doing it temporarily while aliases aren't supported within Cloudron).

[girish]

@lonk I see, let me try to understand who WP multi-site works then. I thought we had to auto configure the domains in the package, maybe that's not needed.

[Lonkle]

@girish said in Domain Aliases:

@lonk I see, let me try to understand who WP multi-site works then. I thought we had to auto configure the domains in the package, maybe that's not needed.

Well, that would be out of scope of Cloudron box code. Multiple domains can be set "per site" in a multi-site Wordpress installation and are configurable / editable. Meaning, the user edits their domain and adds one when they add a new site / blog within their multisite installation. Coincidentally, in Wordpress, they're called URL Aliases (you can even give a single post its own domain if you dig deep enough in Wordpress but most use it the default way via the "Sites" tab and adding aliases to their individual sites within the installation).

I'm currently making Cloudron for Wordpress which I'm guessing I'll add more features down the road, but right now it's only function is that it will add any domain alias additions or changes to the parent Cloudron App Container. It's a very simple plugin. Only a few lines. I'd recommend packaging it into Cloudron's Wordpress Installation like you do the SMTP plugin (but as a Must Use plugin to ensure it's always active and cannot be deactivated).

Tbh, because the UI is technically going to be in Wordpress, we don't need any UI changes in dashboard, just an API endpoint for any given Wordpress container to add domain aliases to itself. Adding an API endpoint for a special type of domain location seems well within the scope of box.

[Lonkle]

And as you can see in: https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/4219/pressbooks-ebook-publishing-based-on-wordpress-multisite?_=1610925351271

Plugins can use Wordpress' routing features as they like, so making this one-way sync of domains from with Wordpress to Wordpress Container makes the most sense to be compatible with all plugins.

Also, side note, I've never seen a web hosting platform that didn't make you add a "CPanel Domain Alias" and then a "Wordpress Native URL Alias" in multisite every time you added or edited a site / alias.

It's confused quite a few people, so this also reduces complexity for users coming into multisite. Not even hosts like WP Engine have that kind of domain integration (yet, I'm sure they will as multisite just keeps getting more popular) so this would be quite a differentiator for your platform when it comes to multisite.

[jimcavoli]

@girish The only technical requirement is that the IP gets hit with the corresponding Host header - the stumbling block is just on the reverse proxy's answer of 3xx vs proxy essentially. I think that was your understanding before, and if so, that still holds.

As far as the note about having to add things twice, that's mostly down to still just that DNS point easier and the second add would generally be to reconfigure the underlying apache running WP (and why WP Engine et al generally require a manual step). In the cloudron case though, we can just have a wildcard server and move on since this isn't a cPanel or similar environment and we do have the reverse proxy and other features keeping the final upstream links "clean." The "traditional" model for this is a server at x.x.x.x with one or many subdomains using that x.x.x.x in their A records.

[Lonkle]

@jimcavoli So, what are you proposing we do differently then a Wordpress-based one-way sync method? We could do it the other way around.

Or we could also just have the user configure their custom domain in both places (in Cloudron as an Location Alias, and in Wordpress as a URL Aliases - tho I don't like this option if only due to common user error).