Apache userdir with custom url

Question

mod_userdir seems to be able customize where the home folders are, but is there a way to make those available under a custom URL?

I want to provide users with a url like the following: http://example.com/arbitrarystring/[user]

Answer 1

This is entirely doable. I did just that and recorded the efforts here. This is a solution that does use mod-rewrite, but not deep wizardry. The problem we had was that when we were implementing user_dirs, The Powers That Be thought using a shift key to get at a directory was too much work and wanted a tilde-free version. That's a one character version of what you're doing.

The meat is in the RewriteRule statements.

RewriteRule  ^/somestring/([a-z0-9]+)         /~$1    [R]

The problem here is that /~username will still work. You can possibly get around that by using an internal proxy-redirect to another hidden domain name.

RewriteRule ^/somestring/(a-z0-9]+)        http://othervhost.example.com/~$1      [PT]