Custom URL forwarding

AHarvey · 6 Jul 2015 at 14:53

Hi all,

Looking for advice but on url forwarding but not your normal redirect issues (i don't think).

I want to be able to generate a url in the following fashion:

domain.co.uk/customername.incrementingNumber

then when it hits my site I want to forward that onto another URL. The thing is the customers need to be able to login to an admin panel and change the outgoing URL themselves.

How would you suggest is the best way of approaching this?

meandu229 · 6 Jul 2015 at 15:13

Depends what technologies you want to use/are comfortable in, holding a database of urls vs a customername shouldnt be too hard. What sort of server are you running windows or linux?

AHarvey · 6 Jul 2015 at 15:41

It'll be with Vidahost on their cloud hosting which is Linux based as far as I am aware.

meandu229 · 6 Jul 2015 at 16:02

AHarvey said:
It'll be with Vidahost on their cloud hosting which is Linux based as far as I am aware.

Was it something you were hoping you could just install or are willing to/want to write?
You could no doubt do this in either ASP.net or PHP both of which Vidahost supports, backed by MSSQL or MySQL database.

AHarvey · 6 Jul 2015 at 16:14

oh no I was looking at writing it from the ground up, just after advice on how others would approach it.

I was thinking PHP + MySQL as I know more about these than anything and it'll make a good project to really learn on

kaku · 6 Jul 2015 at 17:38

Use htaccess to redirect all requests to the root directory (you will probably have to specify an exception to provide some kind of admin panel).

Run a PHP script at the index that takes the requested url components, validates them, then checks them against the database for the new url to forward to.

Crowze · 6 Jul 2015 at 19:52

If your hosting provider supports it you'd be better off using a RewriteMap - a DBM hash file will be much faster than running a PHP script and going off to an external database for every request, plus you can manage it directly from PHP.