In these days of cheap domains, it's often desirable to own multiple domains for a single website. You've probably got each of the .com, .net and .org domain names, along with a country-specific domain. You want each of these to present exactly the same website to the world, but good design says that each web page should have one, and exactly one, URL. So what's the best way to serve this up without having an Apache config for each domain?
I've come across this whilst building a website recently whereby the primary domain is mydomain.com.au, while I've got secondary domains in other popular TLD's to try and reduce domain squatting and the like.
One option is to configure an Apache virtual host for each domain, which serves up a static redirect. Another is to have Apache aliases for the main host, so each of the domains serves up the same content. This works, but leaves each page with multiple URL's.
My solution is to set up Apache aliases, and use a Django middleware to identify any requests that aren't for the main domain name, redirecting them as they're found. The middleware code I use is as follows:
from django.http import HttpResponsePermanentRedirect
class ValidateHostMiddleware(object):
"""
Redirect all requests for a domain other than mysite.com.au
"""
def process_request(self, request):
if not request.META['HTTP_HOST'].endswith('mysite.com.au'):
return HttpResponsePermanentRedirect('http://www.mysite.com.au%s' % request.path)
This is nice and simple, and a useful way of having multiple domains (possibly increasing your virtual 'geographical spread') but keeping your search-engine optimisation efforts intact.
Update: Thanks to a note from Brice Carpenter, I've updated the code to do a permanent HTTP redirect (code 301) rather than a temporary (302) redirect. I've also added code from my live environment that sends the visitor to their request path on the new domain - so hitting www.mysite.com/about/policies/ refers the user to www.mysite.com.au/about/policies/.