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Thank you.

The modern way for step 4 would probably be by using default_scope, right?

Sweet Thanks,

Can you make it a bit simpler next time? :o)

Just a wee blog usability heads-up. Browsing with JavaScript disabled (the way I roll) nothing at all shows up for this post – not even an indicator that something isn’t showing up.

You also might want to check your error message on a JavaScript disabled form submit.

I’ll be bookmarking the code though so thanks. This is definitely something I will need.

Hi David,

I was thinking about that just yesterday at night and was planning to try differente approaches.

Thank you!!!

Didn’t Rails move from @params to params? Cuz I usually don’t use such before_filters anymore for e.g. current_user and current_account.

just a thought…

Why on earth would anyone browse with JavaScript disabled? In 2009?

No more account_location?

Great stuff. Thanks!

In my opinion, you should use the last subdomain, “request.subdomains.last” instead of the first. For our online stores at Storenvy, I’ve seen a lot of users try “www.subdomain.storenvy.com”. I’ve even seen store owners publish their links in that format. So, I figured I should just make it work for people.

I forked the Gist and added my slight alteration. http://gist.github.com/44415

Any reason why one shouldn’t do this? I noticed Basecamp redirects if you put “www” at the start of the URL . But is that necessarily better?

Thanks for posting this!

Does anybody know how to get subdomain.localhost working for running in a local dev environment?

You don’t need to bother with the ServerName *.domain.tld, apache doesn’t seem to support wildcards there, and it doesn’t matter anyway since if you’re only running one virtual host, or your wildcard domain is the first vhost loaded by apache, everything that doesn’t match another vhost will be directed to there. ServerAlias seems to support wildcards though. I’ve never needed to change the apache configuration if all the requests come into one vhost, even with NameVirtualHosts configured and enabled.

I use lynx to view my infanets. That’s the way I roll, son.

This page seems to have some javascript at the bottom that calls: http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/37signals.json?callback=twitterCallback2&count=3

Whenever I load this page, I get the grey htauth login box saying: To view this page you need to log in to area “Twitter API ” on twitter.com:80

I click cancel and the 37Signals page logs

“You can well have multiple applications on the same web server that all respond to this, though.”

I don’t know what that means. Maybe you can put:

NamedVirtualHost *:80
<virtualhost *:80>
ServerName www1.example.com
ServerAlias *.example.com
DocumentRoot /srv/1
</virtualhost>

<virtualhost *:80>
ServerName www2.example.com
ServerAlias *.example.com
DocumentRoot /srv/2
</virtualhost>

but (if apache doesn’t complain about this and still runs), all requests for blah.example.com will go to which ever vhost matches the ServerAliases first, /srv/1 in this case.

You need to have unique values in each ServerName and ServerAlias for each vhost, even if they are wildcards and match multiple names.

ServerName is also used to specifiy the canonical name for the server/vhost instance. Also make sure you have UseCanonicalName Off so links and names that apache might generate (like for error pages, if you aren’t sending those through your app code also) match the host header rather than the ServerName value.

This is actually why I usually set up the initial vhost to be some generic server that contains no files (or a redirect somewhere else) and create specific vhosts for each other domain that this server serves. This way, if something gets confused (say the case of an HTTP /1.0 client which doesn’t send a Host header) a request for second-vhost.example.com that ends up on first-vhost.example.com doesn’t show the content for the wrong domain. This is more of an issue with shared virtual hosting though.

Thanks for publishing this info, David. These sorts of svn articles (i.e. insights into how 37signals apps use rails) are great.

So, in this example, would the basecamp home page and info pages be served with a separate VirtualHost that only responds to www.example.com?

Please keep pouring more snippets like these…..really helpful… thankyou

Please keep pouring more snippets like these…..really helpful… thankyou

David & all,

I decided to take this example a step further and provide a tutorial that allows you to handle scoping on accounts through subdomains and also handling a www site.

You can check out, Subdomain accounts with Ruby on Rails explained on my blog.

David, do you maintain a list in the app of subdomains that are not allowed (e.g. www, admin, support, blog, help)? Or create dummy accounts with those names?

wandering – In know that in some apps 37s support https - how the redirection works ? 10x.

Alex’s question is a good one—which subdomains should be reserved?

Has anyone thought through this and created a list of subdomains a typical web app/company would want to reserve?

Does 37signals reserve Basecamp subdomains for purposes other than user accounts?

Alex/Ben,

My post here shows you how to reserve subdomains from being used by your customers.

View post here

Cheers Robby