Domain Aliases

[Lonk]

I'm making this a separate request from WP Multisite Official Support because it actually would cover a lot of use cases way beyond Wordpress. Almost every control panel allows for aliases in this way, and would be very helpful for Cloudron to add this as a base feature in the Location tab of every app (choosing whether you want a domain to be treated as a redirection to the primary domain, or as an alias to the primary domain - to which the web app would handle the routing - and that is currently already built in to Wordpress' Multisite feature).

[girish]

I like the idea of domain aliases in general. We can also carry over this concept to the mail server.

[Lonk]

@girish Agreed, This is how HSphere and Cpanels use them as well. You already have the GUI for it, just a checkbox and boom.

[marcusquinn]

@girish definitely need for the mail server.

[Lonk]

@girish said in Domain Aliases:

I like the idea of domain aliases in general. We can also carry over this concept to the mail server.

I was reading this Feature Request and was wondering if you guys have any roadmap, milestone pages in which to see what features make the cut? Or maybe you could use this very forum - if only it had any other status than "Solved" like "In Development" or "Considering". That would be really cool on here.

[marcusquinn]

We need to develop something for aliases this week, will update here if we can do independently or need to look into the box.

[girish]

@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 From what we have seen, anything more "forward" looking gets obsolete/out of date very quickly.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).

[Lonk]

@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 From what we have seen, anything more "forward" looking gets obsolete/out of date very quickly.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.

[Lonk]

@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.

[Lonk]

@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. ️

[Lonk]

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.

[Lonk]

@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?

[Lonk]

@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).

[Lonk]

@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!

[Lonk]

@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?