CakePHP Plugin - how to setup Apache Rewrite for vanity URL - php

Question

Been trying to figure this out for a few days now with no joy. Here's my setup: I have a CakePHP install in
/home/user/tools/cakephp
and a plugin at
/home/user/tools/cakephp/app/Plugin/MyPlugin
The Apache server setup is such that I've set the DocRoot to /home/user/tools, so browsing to
http://myserver.com/cakephp/my_plugin
works fine, but now my client wants to set it up so that
http://myserver.com/product-name
serves up the CakePHP plugin, and all subsequent routes are honoured. Has anyone had any experience setting something like this up? Has to be Apache, unfortunately, and can be done with a mixture of config/.htaccess (clients constraints).
Thanks
Stephen

Answer 1

You are saying you have to do this via the Apache config or a .htaccess file, why? A plugin can have either his own Config/routes.php or you could configure the routing in your app wide app/Config/routes.php file. We are doing the same for a plugin we are using in our application.
What we did:
In the app wide routes file (app/Config/routes.php) we set a variable we use as our base url for accessing the plugin. We set it in a variable so we can easily switch when we get collisions with other controllers or plugins, so we want to keep that flexibility by doing the following:
# set the webroot for the plugin, for ajax calls and the sake of usability
$MyPluginBase = '/product-name';
# And we have this set just in case we need it somewhere in our application
Configure::write('MyPlugin.base', $MyPluginBase);
Then we configure our custom routes:
Router::connect($MyPluginBase . '/:name', array(
'plugin' => 'my_plugin',
'controller' => 'my_plugin_products',
'action' => 'products'
));
Router::connect($MyPluginBase . '/some/other/url/*', array(
'plugin' => 'my_plugin',
'controller' => 'my_plugin_some_controller',
'action' => 'whatever'
));
Now we can access the pugin via the 'product-name' url.
But, when you simply need a controller/action wide solution for this, you could accomplish this by using the following two routes:
Router::connect($MyPluginBase . '/:controller/:action/*', array(
'plugin' => 'my_plugin'
));
Router::connect($MyPluginBase . '/*', array(
'plugin' => 'my_plugin',
'controller' => 'my_plugin_main_controller'
));
Please note that the order of Router::connect methods matters!
ps. After reading the question again, I saw you have set your DocumentRoot wrong for production. Consult the following page in the cookbook for clarification: http://book.cakephp.org/2.0/en/installation.html#production

Answer 2

Adding the following line to the htaccess file should work
RedirectMatch 301 cake/my_plugin(.*) /product-name$1
The above would resolve:
http://myserver.com/cakephp/my_plugin to http://myserver.com/product-name
http://myserver.com/cakephp/my_plugin/somelink to http://myserver.com/product-name/somelink

Answer 3

When you say "all subsequent routes are honoured", I assume you mean that http://myserver.com/product-name/foo/bar will work the same as http://myserver.com/cakephp/my_plugin/foo/bar.
If that is the case, and you have mod_aliasinstalled, all you need to do is provide an Alias directive in httpd.conf:
Alias /product-name /cakephp/my_plugin
This should be completely transparent to CakePHP; it will be unaware that this mapping is happening.
If you want to prevent direct requests to http://myserver.com/cakephp/..., you could also add an external redirect:
Redirect 301 /cakephp/my_plugin /product-name
(from http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_alias.html#alias)