SubdomainFu

SubdomainFu provides a modern implementation of subdomain handling in Rails. It takes aspects from account_location, request_routing, and other snippets found around the web and combines them to provide a single, simple solution for subdomain-based route and url management.

Installation

SubdomainFu is available both as a traditional plugin and a GemPlugin. To install it as a traditional plugin (Rails 2.1 or later):

script/plugin install git://github.com/mbleigh/subdomain-fu.git

To use it as a GemPlugin, add it to your environment.rb:

config.gem 'mbleigh-subdomain-fu', :source => "http://gems.github.com", :lib => "subdomain-fu"

Examples

SubdomainFu works inside of Rails’s URL Writing mechanisms to provide an easy and seamless way to link and otherwise understand cross-subdomain routing. You can use the :subdomain option both in named and non-named routes as well as in generated resources routes.

Let’s say my domain is ‘intridea.com’. Here are some examples of the use of the :subdomain option:

url_for(:controller => “my_controller”,

:action => "my_action", 
:subdomain => "awesome") # => http://awesome.intridea.com/my_controller/my_action

Now let’s say I’m at awesome.intridea.com/ and I want back to the root. Specifying “false” will remove any current subdomain:

users_url(:subdomain => false) # => intridea.com/users

Note that this plugin does not honor the :only_path notion of routing when doing so would go against the intent of the command. For example, if I were at intridea.com again:

users_path(:subdomain => “fun”) # => fun.intridea.com/users users_path(:subdomain => false) # => /users

In this way you can rest assured that you will never misdirect your links to the same subdomain when you meant to change it.

Configuration

You may need to configure SubdomainFu based on your development setup. The configuration required is:

tld_size

A hash for each environment of the size of the top-level domain name. (something.com = 1, localhost = 0, etc.)

SubdomainFu.tld_size = 1 # sets for current environment SubdomainFu.tld_sizes = => 0,

:test => 0,
:production => 1 # set all at once (also the defaults)

mirrors

Mirrors are the subdomains that are equivalent to no subdomain (i.e. they ‘mirror’) the usage of the root domain.

SubdomainFu.mirrors = %w(www site we) # Defaults to %w(www)

preferred_mirror

SubdomainFu also understands the notion of a ‘preferred mirror’, that is, if you always want your links going to ‘www.yourdomain.com’ instead of ‘yourdomain.com’, you can set the preferred mirror like so:

SubdomainFu.preferred_mirror = “www”

Now when you create a link to a false subdomain

Known Issues / Future Work

SubdomainFu will eventually integrate with Rails’ routing internals to provide the ability to specify routes based on the condition of a specific subdomain or simply whether a subdomain is present (or a mirror).

Resources

Copyright © 2008 Michael Bleigh (www.mbleigh.com/) and Intridea, Inc. (www.intridea.com/). Released under the MIT license