Topic: Map or redirect to path based on referer

[chelyapov]

I've been trying to figure out a solution to this problem. I want to create a publicly accessible staging/dev site, but there are many absolute URLs being used throughout the site. My colleague says we have to make all the URLs relative before we can launch this site, but I keep thinking that there must be away to configure the server or write a script that would take care of this for us.

I'm using Apache 2.4.29 on Ubuntu 16.04, with PHP 5.6.36 and MySQL 5.7.22.

I created rewrite rules in the VirtualHost and set environment variables to indicate if I'm on the staging site or the live site. I also added an auto_prepend_file to my php.ini that could create a redirect based on a variable's value. But I didn't quite get it working the way I want it. I can get it to load just dev.example.org correctly, but clicking on an absolute link to www.example.org either takes me to the live site or, when I try to use the redirect approach, fails with too many redirects.

I'm thinking that this would be what I want:

If the HTTP_REFERER is http://dev.example.org, then it uses the DocumentRoot /var/vhosts/staging.
If the HTTP_REFERER is http://www.example.org then it uses the DocumentRoot /var/www.

Is this possible to do? If we weren't using PHP exec files, then I could just use Javascript to replace all the domain names. I don't know if it's possible to dynamically rewrite a PHP file with a little script so that the file remains intact for it to be pushed to the live site as is.

[James Blond]

you can use mod_sed[1]




[1] https://httpd.apache.org/docs/trunk/mod/mod_sed.html

[chelyapov]

I will give this a try, thank you!