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I have an "Is this going to work?" question.

I'm building a multi-tenanted application. DNS and Apache will be configured so that multiple subdomains will point to the site.

site1.example.com
site2.example.com
site3.example.com

etc ...

I am going to use the value returned by $request->getHost() to deliver different content depending on the subdomain.

For most requests, I will derive and validate an integer site_id value from the host name. That will be used in database queries to retrieve and deliver the appropriate content.

I will also be using twig sub templates using {% render url(route) %} where the action for the sub template route will deliver custom content based on the host. It might render a unique template with the name constructed using the host name.

I want users to be able to switch between "sites" without having to login again. I can set the domain for the PHP session cookie and Symfony's "remember me" cookie to .example.com (note the dot).

I've done some simple tests with this idea and it seems to work. Are there any issue or gotchas that I'm forgetting about? I don't want to do something that not really supported. I'm a little nervous about things like caching etc. Is Symfony happy with me accessing the site with multiple host names?

I've enabled the Symfony reverse proxy and this still seems to work okay although app/cache/prod/http_cache always seems to be empty so I guess the caching is not really working. That's a different subject I guess. I need to learn more about the caching but in general, is the Symfony reverse proxy going to be happy with this? Is the cache based on the full URL or just the route?

I know there's the new routing by host name feature. I don't think that's useful to me here because I want the same action methods to execute regardless of host.

I think I'm okay but I'd really appreciate any comments before I commit to this.

Thanks

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I realise this is probably too late to be of use to you, but I thought I'd chime in anyway.

Short answer, I have live in production a site very similar to what you describe based off symfony2.1, and it works great.

Long answer, beginning with a caveat: it doesn't use much of the symfony2 caching system as yet, so there may be gotchas there as you describe. As they say, there are really only two hard problems in computer science; naming things, cache invalidation, and off-by-one errors.

The various subsystems that you mention all seem sensible and similar to what I have done. I would centralise all of your 'am I site1 or site2?'-related code into a single service, which you can then pass around to, for example, a templating helper, or other custom services.

Setting your firewall.name.remember_me.cookie and framework.security.cookie_domain to .example.com will allow you seamless login (and, equally important, logout) across all domains, for those users who are allowed to see site1 and site2 for example. One gotcha here is that browsers which properly implement cookie security will require at least one dot (not including the leading dot) in your domain name... so if your dev machine is localhost.localdomain and you are trying to set cookies on .localdomain, you might be left scratching your head for a bit. (I was pretty annoyed at myself for not already knowing this.)

As you mentioned, the routing-by-hostname is not super useful in this context. Although you could imagine passing the hostname as an argument to all your Controller actions, this is anti-DRY if you are doing it on every single request. Best to create a kernel.request listener.

Other random tip:

$router->getContext()->setHost( 'site2.example.com' ); $url = $router->generate( 'homepage', array(), true );

will allow you to generate links to other subdomains.

Hope it all worked out for you!

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Thanks for this. I'm progressing slowly with my moonlighting project involving this and its working well although I haven't done anything special with caching yet and quite likely won't need to.

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