how to mask a domain in php - php

I have a php website. There is a domain example http://www.mydomain.com/clubs.php I want to mast it to http://www.mydomain.com/groups.php and the rest of the address will remain the same. Is it possible.
Please guide me how to achive it..

You could create a new file named groups.php and include in it clubs.php.
Or you could use mod_rewrite via .htaccess file.
For including file use:
<?php include_once 'clubs.php'; ?>
For rewriting use and add it after line RewriteEngine On:
RewriteRule ^groups.php$ clubs.php [L]
Hope I've understood what you're talking about with mask.

If I understood you correctly, then you need to use apache directive URLRewrite (mod_rewrite). Google it. It's complex to explain here, but basicaly there are few lines to add in .htaccess file and your webserver must support it. Some do not supoprt for securty reasons. If the server is administered by you then you can easily modify this in VirtualHost directive of yout httpd.conf file.
maxim

Use the Apache mod_rewrite module, see below :
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_rewrite.html
http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/other/using-htaccess-files-for-pretty-urls/
http://docforge.com/wiki/Clean_URL

You cannot "mask" a domain or URL. A link points to a certain URL. That URL is necessary for the browser to find the server it's supposed to send the request to and to make the request. The browser will send the request to that URL and it will display the URL it sent the request to in the address bar. You cannot make it send a request to one URL but have it display a different URL.
You can make your webserver react to that URL/request any way you want. Just because the request said "clubs.php" doesn't mean the webserver will execute a file called "clubs.php" or that it has to execute some PHP file at all. That can be customized in the webserver itself, typically through URL rewriting in Apache. That's all just internal to the webserver however, it configures how your webserver reacts to an incoming request for a certain URL; it does not "mask" the URL.
If you have links pointing to "clubs.php" but you want them to point to "groups.php" instead, you'll have to change your links. No way around it.
You could redirect all requests for "clubs.php" to "groups.php". I.e., when your webserver receives a request for "clubs.php", it responds to the client by telling it to ask for "groups.php" instead. That's a redirection. It will still make your links point to "clubs.php" though.

Related

Do browsers ignore suffixes?

By mistake, I did not add the suffix .php when I wrote a URL into the browser during a check on my website. The browser ignored it and simply returned the page as if I had added the .php suffix, anyway! Is this normal? Do all modern browsers see a URL like www.website.com/thispage and simply go to thispage.php or thispage.html, if they exist?
Requests go to the server.
Any basic URL in the address bar of a browser make an HTTP request to the server defined by the domain (or hostname). So, http://www.something.com/here/there.x sends a whole bunch of info (in the "HEADER" of the request) to the IP registered for the www subdomain of something.com. That server gets the request, which in the header includes information about your browser, IP, type of request, the full address requested, any submitted data from a form, etc.
Your server's http engine decides what to do with it
Apache, nginx, iis, are different types of HTTP servers who's whole purpose are to listen for such requests, and decide what to do about them.
Typically, this includes setting some degree of defaults, for instance:
match the domain to a directory
something.com: /var/www/site1
strange.com: /var/www/site2
default: /var/default
match the path (everything after the '/' following the domain) to a file
check for a matching .html file
check for a matching .php file
Check permissions and authentication
Execute the file according to config
send the php file to a php process, and reroute the output
simple grab and dump the contents of images, txt, and html files.
Send a response according to what was just executed.
This is DRASTICALLY simplified, and there are many many layers and specifics, but I'm trying to keep this as simple as the question.
You tell apache (or whatever) what to do.
Apache can be configured to return a styleized google search for cats, any time anyone requests `http://blah.something.com/[anything]/*.good. It can be configured to do just about anything you want it to, based on the url you send it. The browser only decides what is sent.
It is completely up to the web server, and it's configuration, as to how a URL is handled. Web servers like Apache, NGinx, Cherokee, Litespeed, etc all have different mechanisms for what happens when a URL request hits it, and then what it decides to do afterwards.
For instance, you could have your web server attempt to add .php and .htm and .html suffixes to the requested url, in order to try to be helpful. Or simply serve up the 404 page, or send the request to the home page - eg index.php.

Create SEO permalinks using PHP without .htaccess

Currently, my page URLs look this this:
http://ourdomain.com/articles/?permalink=blah-blah-blah
I want to convert these to:
http://ourdomain.com/articles/blah-blah-blah
How can I accomplish this using PHP but not with .htaccess?
How can i accomplish this using php but not with .htaccess..
You can't. You will need to tell the web server how to deal with URLs that don't physically exist. In Apache, that is done in the central configuration or in a .htaccess file.
If your server already happens to have AccepPathInfo On, you can try having URLs like
http://ourdomain.com/index.php/articles/blah-blah-blah
which will redirect to index.php and have articles/blah-blah-blah in the $_SERVER["PATH_INFO"] variable. This method is known as "poor man's URL rewriting" because you can't get rid of the index.php part in the URL. If the mentioned setting is turned on (I think it is by default), you may be able to do this without using a .htaccess file.
You can achieve this without mod_rewrite if you have access to the server configuration. Assuming you're using Apache, the first thing you would need to do is turn the MultiViews option on on your document root (ie. add Options MultiViews). Now copy your /articles/index.php to /articles.php (so put the script in your document root and rename it), and adapt your script so it reads $_SERVER["PATH_INFO"] to fetch the correct page (this of course relies on having AcceptPathInfo On).
MultiViews will make sure that the articles.php script is called when you provide a /articles/blah-blah URL.
I don't think you can easily do it without altering .htaccess. You'll most definitely need to use mod_rewrite. See the answers here for more info:
Special profile page link like www.domain.com/username
It is possible to do it in PHP, without modifying .htaccess
Just write following code in either index.php or default.php
<?php
if (isset($_GET['permalink'])) {
header('Location: '.urlencode($_GET['permalink']));
}
?>
It works because when you type following URL:
http://ourdomain.com/articles/?permalink=blah-blah-blah
The filename is not specified.
So, the server looks whether "index" or "default" file is present in the specified directory.
Consider file index.php is present, so server will call:
http://ourdomain.com/articles/index.php
with blah-blah-blah in GET variable permalink
The PHP code checks if permalink GET variable is present, and redirects using header() method.
EDIT: added urlencode() to do input validation

php - clean URL

I want to create a web site with pure PHP. I want to hide the url parameters. I.e. I want to make my web site with clean urls. Is there is any way to do this with out using any framework? Is cURL helpful to do this?
See URL rewriting in PHP without .htaccess if you don't want to or can't use .htaccess, else refer to How to: URL rewriting in PHP?.
Just have a look on it...before you start your stuffs
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/misc/rewriteguide.html
First of all: It is not possible with PHP only (at least not the forms of URL I think of when reading clean URL). The web server needs to know how to handle requests and what requests are meant to be passed to your PHP script. Otherwise you will probably just get a 404 response.
Because the default behavior of a web server is to just take the requested URL path and try to map it to an existing file below the document root. If a corresponding file was found, either the file’s content is passed back to the client or – as in case of PHP files – the file’s content is passed to an appropriate interpreter and the returned data is passed back to the client. And if the file was not found, well, it responds with the status code 404. So at some point you need to configure your web server.
But after that, when the request was passed to your PHP script, you sure can use just PHP to establish clean URLs. And I would rather suggest to do that with PHP than with web server utilities. Because your PHP application should know best how to handle a requested URL.
In PHP, all required information are in the $_SERVER variable:
$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] holds the requested URL path and query (you can parse that with parse_url), and
$_SERVER['PATH_INFO'] holds the PATH_INFO if you’re using that (see Apache’s AcceptPathInfo directive).
Try to rewrite url using php and rewrite url using .HTACCESS.
For example, original url,
www.domain.com/item.php?product=Cars for sale in amazon
with php
www.domain.com/item.php?product=Cars-for-sale-in-amazon
and with .HTACCESS file
www.domain.com/Cars-for-sale-in-amazon
Nope, no curl or framework doing this. Nor php at all.
It is web server who deal with urls.
So, if you want fake urls, you have to set up your web server to redirect certain urls to certain scripts.
The most common way is to use Apache web server with mod_rewrite module
From what I have read and understand of it, there's 2 ways you can do this:
The first being mod_rerite where everything seems to re fone through rewrite rules through the .htaccess file fairly simple to do but can put big load on webserver with large sites
Use PHP to control the rerites this does use .htaccess but only to redirect everything back to the index.php where a dispatcher reroutes paths as necessary. There's a fantastic tutorial of this at phpvideotutorials.com the tutorial is called the tumblelog.

Why the trailing slash in the web service is so important?

I was testing a web service in PHP and Python. The address of the web service was, let's say, http://my.domain.com/my/webservice. When I tested the web service in PHP using that URL everything worked fine. But, when I used the same location but in Python using SOAPpy I got an error.
Below is the code I used to communicate with the web service (Python):
from SOAPpy import WSDL
server = SOAPProxy('http://my.domain.com/my/webservice', namespace)
server.myFunction()
The respond I got from the server:
HTTPError: <HTTPError 301 Moved Permanently>
I figure out that if I add a trailing slash to the web service location it works!
from SOAPpy import WSDL
server = SOAPProxy('http://my.domain.com/my/webservice/', namespace)
server.myFunction()
Why the lack of the trailing slash causes the error?
They're different URLs. http://my.domain.com/my/webservice implies a file webservice in the my folder. http://my.domain.com/my/webservice/ implies the default document inside the my/webservice folder.
Many webservers will automatically correct such URLs, but it is not required for them to do so.
Because the actual server URL is:
http://my.domain.com/my/webservice/
The PHP library must be following redirects by default.
The error is a 301 redirect meaning the you are being redirected to the URL with the slash on the end by the web server.
It seems that PHP will auto follow this redirect and thus not throw the error, whereas Python won't. You will need to do the following:
Try to Connect to the initial URL
Catch any 301 redirect and possibly 302 redirects as well
If there was a redirect then try to connect to that URL instead.
The new URL should be available in the response headers.
HTH.
[Disclaimer: This is a copy of my answer from here. I know some people don't like this kind of copying, but this explains why the slash is important.]
Imagine you serve a page
http://mydomain.com/bla
that contains
Read more...
On click, the user's browser would retrieve http://mydomain.com/more.html. Had you instead served
http://mydomain.com/bla/
(with the same content), the browser would retrieve http://mydomain.com/bla/more.html. To avoid this ambiguity, the redirection appends a slash if the URL points to a directory.
What a SOAP-URL looks like is up to the server, if a slash is necessary depends on the server and the SOAP implementation.
In your case, I assume that the target server is an apache server and the SOAP URL is actually a directory that contains your SOAP handling script.
When you access http://my.domain.com/my/webservice on the server, apache decides that the directory is properly addressed as http://my.domain.com/my/webservice/ and sends a 301 redirect.
SOAP uses a http POST, its up to the client to decide if the redirect should be followed or not, I assume that it just doesn't expect one.
Other implementations of SOAP, e.g. Apache Axis in Java have URLs that look like Servlets, e.g. http://domain.com/soap/webservice without slash, in this case the URL without slash is correct, there is no directory that exists anyway.
Axis fails on redirects as well, I think.

Pretty URLs without mod_rewrite, without .htaccess

Without a possibility to access .htaccess I find myself in a creative impasse. There is no mod_rewriting for me. Nevertheless, I want to be able to do the nice stuff like:
http://www.example.com/Blog/2009/12/10/
http://www.example.com/Title_Of_This_Page
What are my alternatives?
In respond to the answers:
I'm building with php5
I don't have access to .htaccess
http://www.example.com/index.php/Blog/ is a known technique but I don't prefer it. Is shows the php so to say.
How would I create extensionless PHP-files? Would this do the trick?
How much would using the custom 404 technique hurt performance?
If you've the permissions to set custom error documents for your server you could use this to redirect 404 requests.
E.g. for Apache (http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/core.html#errordocument)
ErrorDocument 404 /index.php
In the index.php you then can proceed your request by using data from the $_SERVER array.
You can also have urls like
http://domain.com/index.php/Blog/Hello_World
out of the box with PHP5. You can then read the URL parameters using
echo $_SERVER['PATH_INFO'];
Remember to validate/filter the PATH_INFO and all other request variables before using them in your application.
I know this question is very old but I didn't see anyone else suggest this possible solution...
You can get very close to what you want just by adding a question mark after the domain part of the URL, ie;
http://www.example.com/?Blog/2009/12/10/
http://www.example.com/?Title_Of_This_Page
Both of the above HTTP requests will now be handled by the same PHP script;
www.example.com/index.php
and in the index.php script, $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] for the two pages above will be respectively;
Blog/2009/12/10/
Title_Of_This_Page
so you can handle them however you want.
A quite simple way is to:
declare a 404 ErrorDocument (e.g. PHP) in .htaccess
parse the query using $_SERVER and see if it corresponds to any result
if so replace the HTTP status 404 with status 200 using header() and include index.php
If you omit a trailing slash, Apache will serve the first file [alphabetically] which matches that name, regardless of the extension, at least on the 2 servers I have access to.
I don't know how you might use this to solve your problem, but it may be useful at some point.
For example if
http://www.somesite.com/abc.html and http://www.somesite.com/abc.php both exist and http://www.somesite.com/abc is requested, http://www.somesite.com/abc.html will be served.
The only way is to use custom 404 page. You have no possibility to interpret extensionless files with PHP interpreter without reconfiguring the web server's MIME-types. But you say that you can't edit even .htaccess, so there's no other way.
You can write a URI class which parses the user-friendly URL you defined.
If the MultiViews option is enabled or you can convince whoever holds the keys to enable it, you can make a script called Blog.php that will be passed requests to example.com/Blog/foo and get '/foo' in the $_SERVER['PATH_INFO'].

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