WP Alias Domains

[mdreira]

@girish I need alias subdomains for WP dev apps.

I have tested domain aliases in a wordpress app, but it seems to work like a redirect. Switch to the original domain.

Imagine I have a page on a main domain, for example: mydomain.com

I have set up the subdomain alias: sub.mydomain.com

I want that if I visit sub.mydomain.com/page1 it is actually displaying mydomain.com/page1 ibut without changing the domain in the browser, I want it to continue seeing sub.mydomain.com/page1

Right now if I visit sub.mydomain.com/page1 it redirects me to mydomain.com/page1 and I don't want that.

Can I explain myself well? Basically what I want is to create subdomains that lead to the main domain but do not change the domain in the browser. I want it to be a pure alias.

It's possible?

Thank you!

[girish]

@mdreira WP dev app supports multi site. have you checked if your setup is supported by WP multisite - https://docs.cloudron.io/apps/wordpress-developer/#multisite ? In general, having domain aliases only works if the app itself can support it. For example, all the links inside the page etc will still be wrong if we do some simple nginx level alias setup.

[mdreira]

@girish I have to check if all my plugins support WP MU.

Normally, if I create a subdomain within WP MU, it creates a new sub site, but I don't want that. I just want one main site. What I would like is to use it, as if it were a normal WP but alias domains working in Cloudron.

Is it possible to create subdomains without creating the sub sites within WP MU ?. I don't know if this is possible.

As you already know, the result I want is that an alias domain does not change to the main domain in the browser. If WP MU can do it with cloudron without having to create new sub sites, it is just the solution I need.

[girish]

@mdreira yes, this is already possible. Install WP Dev package and you can add aliases in the Location view. It is not needed to convert WP to multisite.

But what would WP_HOME and WP_SITEURL be set to when multiple domains point to same WP install ?

[mdreira]

@girish I don't understand why, but this works perfectly on a fresh install of WP dev, but not on the rest.

Could it be that some plugin interferes with the alias? I'm going to try to deactivate plugins to see if that's what it is.

Edited:
I disabled all plugins and it remains the same. We have redirect and protection plugins so I thought it might interfere. Nothing of that.

I have started to investigate and I have realized one thing. At first we used WP managed apps and then we moved on to WP developer.

What we did was export each WP managed installation with WP all in one migration plugin. Then we import every one with that plugin into a WP developer app, so we never really use a clean install of WP developer.

Is it possible that this has to do with some configuration that prevents alias domains from working?

[jdaviescoates]

@mdreira said in domain alias (not redirect):

At first we used WP managed apps and then we moved on to WP developer.
What we did was export each WP managed installation with WP all in one migration plugin. Then we import every one with that plugin into a WP developer app, so we never really use a clean install of WP developer.
Is it possible that this has to do with some configuration that prevents alias domains from working?

I don't know.

But if so this is (potentially) just yet another example of Cloudron's Managed WP package resulting in unnessary confusion and more support tickets, wasting everyone's time.

IMHO the managed package shouldn't exist.

[mdreira]

@girish I already figured out what makes aliases not work in Wordpress dev.

Within WP, in the Settings / Reading menu when I select a static page to be the home page of the web, the alias domains stop working. As soon as I reconfigure that the home page of the web is the list of blog articles, the aliases works again.

Is it possible to fix this?

[mdreira]

@girish Sorry, I missed answering your question. The home page of all aliases must be the same as the main domain, of course.

Now, alias domains work fine if the blog page is selected as the home page in the main domain. If a static page is selected, the alias domains stop working.

I need this to work because it is a capability that my clients need a lot.

[mdreira]

This post is deleted!

[girish]

@mdreira said in WP Alias Domains:

Now, alias domains work fine if the blog page is selected as the home page in the main domain. If a static page is selected, the alias domains stop working.

WP in general only supports one domain (in non-multisite mode). They have variables like WP_HOME and WP_SITEURL and these can only be set to one domain. Do you have experience with running WP with multiple domains outside Cloudron? What are those values set to when multiple domains point to the same WP install? Does one write some custom php and change those values dynamically?

[mdreira]

I just got it @girish. In short, the only place where the alias cannot work is on the home page, but it does work on all other pages.

Sorry, I had only tested the home page, but not others. This works for me perfectly.

The issue I have found is that the alias breaks the page design that I make with our page builder.

I think it may be a problem with the plugin with which we build the pages, so I'm going to check with them first.

[girish]

@mdreira sounds good! let us know what you find.

[adpiadmin]

Hi, I'm having a similar problem as this one. I'm attempting to move a WordPress site from a server managed with Serverpilot to Cloudron. As is the case mentioned above, individual pages work fine using an alias, but the home page gets redirected to the main website URL.
To get it to work on the Serverpilot server, I modified the wp-config to have the following:
define('WP_HOME', 'https://' . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']);
define('WP_SITEURL', 'https://' . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']);

It looks like Cloudron changes these back to the main site URL each time an alias is added. However, I tried manually changing it back to the entries above and still had the same problem with the home page.

More details:
The WordPress (developer) site in Cloudron is configured for sites.topleveldomain.org. I added an alias for mobilebayarea.topleveldomain.org. Going to mobilebayarea.topleveldomain.org/connect works fine. Going to mobilebayarea.topleveldomain.org redirects to sites.topleveldomain.org. I need it to work using mobilebayarea.topleveldomain.org for the home page just like the other pages. I've got code in the theme files that loads content based on the subdomain used to access the site. This has been working well on the Serverpilot server so I know it is possible but something in Cloudron is messing up the home page.

Any ideas on how to fix?
Thanks

[nebulon]

@adpiadmin not 100% sure if this is what you want, but Cloudron supports domain alias as well for apps, not just redirects. It sounds like this is what you are looking for? https://docs.cloudron.io/apps/#aliases

[adpiadmin]

@nebulon Thanks, but I'm already using aliases. The aliases work fine except for the home page of the WordPress site. As mentioned in my prior post, if I attempt to go to aliasname.topleveldomain.org/somepage, that works fine. The browser stays at aliasname.topleveldomain.org/somepage. However, if I attempt to go to aliasname.topleveldomain.org, it gets redirected to the main location url (sites.topleveldomain.org in my case).

[adpiadmin]

@adpiadmin I think I got this working. It seems that there is something in the WordPress code that doesn't like having hardcoded WP_HOME and WP_SITEURL values if you also have WordPress set to a static home page. Cloudron resets the WP_HOME and WP_SITEURL values each time you add an alias. I changed WordPress to not use a static home page and modified the index.php in our theme file to handle redirecting requests to / to /home (a static page).

[privsec]

I have a staging instance that I use for every WP site I support

I set up the main site first and then clone a backup of it to dev.domain.com

This way I can test out major edits on the dev branch first.

[girish]

@adpiadmin ah cool, I will mark this as solved then.