Remote access to dev website

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martyyn

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#236349 29-May-2018 13:41

At least that's what I think I want to do ! I'm having a mental block day today.

When I redo a website I typically setup a dev site on a Vultr server, update my hosts file and away I go. But this time I want to be able to access the dev site from other PC's without having to update the hosts file.

Is it possible to create a subdomain on my own site (say dev.blah.com) and have that redirect to a subdirectory on Vultr under a different domain name ? I have a Vultr server with a number of other websites on it already but just want to work out if it can be done.

Or is there a better way of doing it ?

I thought of just buying a domain name and building it on that, but it seems a waste of a domain if I can redirect a subdomain (or something).

[e]

I'll try to explain it again.

An existing website (domain.com) is hosted somewhere and I have access to neither the DNS or web hosting.

I have a Vultr server with a couple of other sites and my own site is blah.com.

Can I create a dev version of domain.com on Vultr and point dev.blah.com to it somehow ?

stinger

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#2024843 29-May-2018 14:22

> An existing website (domain.com) is hosted somewhere and I have access to neither the DNS or web hosting.

> Can I create a dev version of domain.com on Vultr and point dev.blah.com to it somehow ?

If you don't have access to the DNS, then you won't be able to create the DNS record for dev.blah.com. Once you have solved that problem, setting it up to point to a subdirectory is a relative easy (assuming you are using Apache or Nginx as the web server).

kobiak

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#2024845 29-May-2018 14:23

I just keep it simple and use subdir from my domain.

helping others at evgenyk.nz

martyyn

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#2024852 29-May-2018 14:30

stinger:

> An existing website (domain.com) is hosted somewhere and I have access to neither the DNS or web hosting.

> Can I create a dev version of domain.com on Vultr and point dev.blah.com to it somehow ?

If you don't have access to the DNS, then you won't be able to create the DNS record for dev.blah.com. Once you have solved that problem, setting it up to point to a subdirectory is a relative easy (assuming you are using Apache or Nginx as the web server).

I don't have access to DNS or hosting for domain.com but I do have DNS access to blah.com.

I think I've just worked it out. I'd created the subdomain dev.blah.com and updated the A record to point to the IP address of the Vultr server but hadn't restarted nginx on Vultr once I had created dev.blah.com. I did that, cleared the Chrome cache and it worked :)

What I would like to know now is, can I create domain.com on Vultr and have dev.blah.com point to it. Mimicking the updating of a hosts file to point to a different IP address.

stinger

628 posts

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#2024861 29-May-2018 14:41

martyyn:

What I would like to know now is, can I create domain.com on Vultr and have dev.blah.com point to it. Mimicking the updating of a hosts file to point to a different IP address.

Yes. There are two approaches:

1) The easiest is to set up a virtual host. This will only work if there are no mentions to https://domain.com in your HTML/JS/CSS.

2) Failing that, you can set up a virtual host, and use proxypass (and set up domain.com in your hosts file on the Vultr VM). This ensures that any reference to https://domain.com/ will be re-written to https://dev.blah.com/ . I haven't tried this with nginx, but a quick Internet search indicates it should work. e.g. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32542282/how-do-i-rewrite-urls-in-a-proxy-response-in-nginx

martyyn

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#2024925 29-May-2018 15:39

stinger:

2) Failing that, you can set up a virtual host, and use proxypass (and set up domain.com in your hosts file on the Vultr VM). This ensures that any reference to https://domain.com/ will be re-written to https://dev.blah.com/ . I haven't tried this with nginx, but a quick Internet search indicates it should work. e.g. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32542282/how-do-i-rewrite-urls-in-a-proxy-response-in-nginx

Brilliant, thanks.

I'm almost there, this gets me to the home page of domain.com on my Vultr server, but clicking on any of the new links sends me to the existing version of domain.com rather than stay on my Vultr version. I'll do some more reading.

Is what I want to do possible or am I trying to do something the hard way ?

sidefx

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#2024960 29-May-2018 16:25

relative paths?

Also, would a CNAME not do for this, or am I missing something?

What I would like to know now is, can I create domain.com on Vultr and have dev.blah.com point to it. Mimicking the updating of a hosts file to point to a different IP address.

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djtOtago

1149 posts

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#2025006 29-May-2018 16:51

As you have access to the DNS setup of blah.com, why not just set up a CNAME record pointing at the site on the Vultr server.

It also looks like you are using absolute path names in your links. ie including http://domain.com/ as part of the url. This will cause you a lot of pain :)

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martyyn

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#2025407 30-May-2018 10:20

My understanding of CNAME is it's nothing more than an alias and will point dev.blah.com to domain.com on the original host rather than domain.com on Vultr.

I'll do some more reading around proxy_pass today and see where I get to.

Killerkiwi2005

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#2025409 30-May-2018 10:27

In general we have a domain that we use for only for development /qa /staging

we just add a wildcard for the DNS at the then can set up sites easily as we need them

ie

- sitedomain-dev.testdomain.nz
- sitedomain-qa.testdomain.nz
- sitedomain-staging.testdomain.nz
- sitedomain.nz (live site)

martyyn

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#2030027 5-Jun-2018 19:16

Killerkiwi2005:

In general we have a domain that we use for only for development /qa /staging

This is what I ended up going with. I think I was just trying to be too clever initially :(