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I am building a small service where users will be assigned a subdomain such as:

myusername.myservice.com
anotheruser.myservice.com

I know that I can set up a wildcard vhost and using some configuration regex, serve the files like so:

myusername.myservice.com        ===> /var/www/myusername
anotherusername.myservice.com   ===> /var/www/anotherusername

The problem is that I would like to allow users to alias their own domain names to their service.

I understand that for the webserver, once the user adds the domain via my web interface, I can easily create a vhost for the domain in nginx and then refresh the webserver.

The problem is that I would prefer to NOT let the users add an A record of my webserver's IP address as I would prefer to keep things flexible (when we upgrade our infrastructure to something more complex to scale).

What is the best way to achieve this?

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1 Answers1

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As I mention in the comment above if you are not using SSL this is pretty simple, just have your clients setup CNAME records against your domain and it's A record. So you end up with this:

WWW.MYDOMAIN.COM | CNAME --> YOURDOMAIN.COM | A --> 123.123.123.123

If you are running SSL there are a couple of different ways to work with this. You can't use the solution above as it will cause certificate errors on most browsers. Instead I usually end up with the same solution above, however instead of serving your content directly from that IP and domain name it instead serves a redirect page/script that forces the user to a SSL URL automatically.

The end result, the user can use their own custom domain name but the URL that is eventually returned is your domain after redirecting the user.

Like I said, there are loads of other ways to do this, but this is what I prefer.

Brent Pabst
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