#123 Subdomains (revised)

Nice screencast!

Why Ryan used find_by with a bang in the end? Is it for raising a RecordNotFound exception? What are the benefits of this practice?

something like

xxx_url(:subdomain => false) in rails 3.1

doesn't work anymore for me. Any ideas?

I keep getting WARNING: Can't verify CSRF token authenticity when submeting a form from the root domain (domain.com) to a subdomain (example.domain.com). I found a way to share the cookies in all subdomains (domain: :all in session_store.rb), but i can't found a way to share the token. Anyone can help me?

Is there a way to not have all other routes respond to the subdomain and viceversa? Since now that same content would get served on two urls and considered duplicated by search engines.

update: I've been doing some research but nothing found, I'm using a basic redirection depending on controller_name and request.subdomain in a before_filter in application_controller

anyone know if its possible to override CSS based on a subdomian?

So I am having trouble linking to static pages. I am trying to do something really simple, subdomain would be a static page and then link between several other static pages within that subdomain. I have it working with subdomain.domain.com/ and subdomain.domain.com/static-page, but how do I link to that?

I've been out of Rails for about a year and just trying to get back up to speed on what has changed and new approaches. I've written a couple small applications that are deployed from home (small audience, like my golf group), but I never completed what got me started on Rails - trying to rewrite an application that was and still is in 4D (aka 4th Dimension) using Active4D as the web access to 4D.

While I am retired, it still bugs me that I never got that conversion completed and occasionally waste a little time thinking of new approaches. This screen cast and the multitenecy got me thinking about yet another approach and is close to what I did years ago for my golf group maxwell.golfgaggle.com, playing with subdomains for groups and accounts (this would have helped at that time).

The application is to support AIDT aidt.edu which is an Alabama State agency that is part of Alabama's economic development team. If short it recruits and screens prospective employees for Alabama businesses (think Mercedes, Honda, Hyundai and many other smaller companies who have located in Alabama).

What I've potentially found this week is that routes, namespaces and subdomains are our friends for solving certain kinds of authentication and authorization problems. The web interface basically had two virtual hosts. jobs.aidt.edu the external site that candidates for job training leading to employment could apply, and an intranet application used to manage parts of the process over the web. The goal was to expand this into several other virtual hosts to enhance the process (project. to allow company users to interact with the process for their company project, instructor. to allow contract instructors to do some things, and then admin. to shield some stuff from the employee users. The above links are to the Active4D site, Rails is still just a thought and AIDT's remaining staff is undermanned - why a try to push them sometimes.

I threw off Devise several years ago and went with Simple Authorization (scratch) and CanCan. While it states that CanCan does not work well with namespace, I think I can get around it because namespace does the majority of the authorization by separating the database. The subdomain/namespaces jobs, project an instructor have limited access to just a few models and the controllers control the access. If they are logged in, thats all they can do. Admin just protects some stuff, but the intranet is pretty wide open and lends itself to CanCan type authorization.

My current approach is:

User is polymorphic as loginable to Citizens, Employees, Contacts and Instructors (maybe others) and only Citizens (jobs namespace) can register, all others are invited.

Most routes are constrained by subdomain

  constraints :subdomain => 'jobs' do
    namespace(:jobs, :path => '/') do
      resources :citizens, [only ...]
      resources :jobs, [only ..] 
      #etc    
    end
  end
  
  constraints :subdomain => 'admin' do
    namespace(:admin, :path => '/') do
      resources :users
      resources :employees do 
        get 'invite'
      end
      resources :citizens
        #etc
    end
  end
  
  
  constraints :subdomain => 'info' do
        #not namespaced intranet site
        #most models available
  end

Have not set up CanCan yet, but it appears that Read Write Manage, etc will take care of most requirements. Non CRUD actions like 'invite', 'drop', 'progress' can also be handled.

This really applies to several screen casts but just thought I'd stick it here.

Ryan, thanks for your work. I'll never be a Rails expert but you certainly open my eyes to different ways of solving problems that sometimes seem unique.

Hi all!

Nice screencast but I don't like:
1. Using lambda in the routes.rb file
2. Problem with adding subdomain: false in every routing that I want to clean urls from subdomain
3. Problem with changing every link_to with _path to _url also for cleaning urls (many hours of work in large project).

My solutions:
ad. 1. Instead of using the lambda I can use smart regular expression:

match '/' => 'blogs#show', constraints: { subdomain: /^(?!www$)(.+)$/i }

Regular expression /^(?!www$)(.+)$/i doesn't allow to handle main domain with www. Really nice, isn't?

ad. 2. I prefer to add following line in development.rb and production.rb files:

config.action_controller.default_url_options = { subdomain: false }

Now using subdomain is disabled by default. I don't need to add subdomain: false in many lines in routes.rb file... ufff.

ad. 3. I prefer to create file url_helper.rb with a few lines of code:

module UrlHelper
  def url_for(options = nil)
    if request.subdomain.present? 
    and request.subdomain.downcase != 'www'
    and !options.nil? and options.is_a?(Hash)
    and options.has_key? :only_path
    and options[:only_path]
      options[:only_path] = false
      puts "Changed options[:only_path] to true. options=#{options.inspect}" unless options.nil?
    end
    super
  end
end

Now I do not have to change thousands of links :-) ufff :-))

It works for me. Do you like it?

P.S. I'm using Rails 3.2

Hi adam-pl,

This is a really great solution! I've been searching all over for something like this and managed to implement without a hitch. One question though - is there any way to stop if spawning a new page every time you click on a link, and so it simply send you to the link path rather than creating another separate page with url?

Thanks!
Mark

Has anyone had success with multiple subdomains having separate sessions as per this question on stackoverflow? http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14573761/rails-separate-sessions-over-multiple-subdomains

This railscasts doesn't cover how to handle config.action_controller.asset_host which is used when emailing for instance.

You want the email to link to the asset in the correct subdomain.

The solution I'm thinking to use looks like this:

config.action_controller.asset_host = Proc.new { |source, request = nil, *_|
  top_level = request.subdomain.split('.')[-1]
  domain = CONFIG['domain']
  '#{top_level}.#{domain}'
}

Though I'm not quite sure how to write a test for this.

I'm having trouble because heroku is requiring the "www." subdomain.

I am having success with pow locally, but when I try to go to the URL in production it fails and the browser can't resolve the URL.

has anyone else encountered this?

Thanks!

I am trying to validate subdomain in Rails 4 but getting exception, can anyone plz help me ?

validates :subdomain, format: { with: /^[a-zA-Z0-9][a-zA-Z0-9.-]+[a-zA-Z0-9]$/ }

Error Message

ArgumentError at /

The provided regular expression is using multiline anchors (^ or $), which may present a security risk. Did you mean to use \A and \z, or forgot to add the :multiline => true option?

Checkout

ngrok.com

Once setup, running a subdomain is as easy as:

ngrok -subdomain=mysubdomain 3000

https://mysubdomain.ngrok.com -> 127.0.0.1:3000
http://mysubdomain.ngrok.com -> 127.0.0.1:3000

I used it to test PayPal's IPN for recurring subscriptions.