yii2 rewrite rule for customer portal - php

Question

I have an yii advanced app with frontend and backend.
What I try to achieve is that I can access the frontend with the name of a customer.
Example (local): http://localhost/myproject/frontend/web/customer1 should become http://localhost/myproject/frontend/web/customer1/site/login at first visit
And after login the name of the customer should stay in the URL. At the moment the URL changes after login to http://localhost/myproject/frontend/web/
Info:
customer is a GET parameter. It should always be the first argument after http://localhost/myproject/frontend/web/ but I don't want to specify the argument in each redirect or custom link. I hope there's a way to keep this argument and pass it to each of the following site changes.
What I have tried so far:
'urlManager' => [
'class' => 'yii\web\UrlManager',
'enablePrettyUrl' => true,
'showScriptName' => false,
'enableStrictParsing' => true,
'rules' => [
'<controller>/<action>' => '<controller>/<action>',
'<customer:\w+>' => '/site/login',
]
],
But this is not working. I can only access the login page and afterwards the customer name is not showing anymore in the URL.
My .htaccess file looks like this:
RewriteEngine on
# If a directory or a file exists, use it directly
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
# Otherwise forward it to index.php
RewriteRule . index.php
I'm really appreciate any hints on this topic.

Answer 1

To prepend customer name to all urls modify your url rule:
<customer:\w+>/<controller>/<action>' => '<controller>/<action>,
If you now call yii\helpers\Url::to(['site/index', 'customer' => 'customer'])the output will be as you want - /customer/site/index.
Howewer calling it like that in entire project is not flexible approach.
Most of the times Url::to() method is used for generating internal urls.
If you pass array in $route, it will call Url::toRoute(). So you can simply override that method in your custom component.
namespace frontend\components;
use yii\helpers\Url as BaseUrl;
class Url extends BaseUrl
{
public static function toRoute($route, $scheme = false)
{
$customer = ... // Get saved after login customer name (for example from the session)
$route['customer'] = $customer;
return parent::toRoute($route, $scheme);
}
}
Then you can simply call frontend\components\Url::to(['site/index']) to achieve the same result.
Alternative way of customizing helper classes described in official documentation here.
Update:
Also this url rule '<customer:\w+>' => '/site/login', is redundant and the url should be just site/login, because any user before signing in is guest.