Laravel Multi Domain

An extension for using Laravel in a multi domain setting

Description

This package allows a single Laravel installation to work with multiple HTTP domains.

There are many cases in which different customers use the same application in terms of code but not in terms of database, storage and configuration.

This package gives a very simple way to get a specific env file, a specific storage path and a specific database for each such customer.

Documentation

Version Compatibility

Further notes on Compatibility

Releases v1.1.x:

• From v1.1.0 to v1.1.5, releases are fully compatibile with Laravel 5.5, 5.6, 5.7, 5.8 or 6.0.
• From v1.1.6+ releases v1.1.x are only compatible with Laravel 5.5 in order to run tests correctly.

To date, releases v1.1.6+, v1.2.x, v1.3.x, v1.4.x, v2.x and v3.x are functionally equivalent. Releases have been separated in order to run integration tests with the corresponding version of the Laravel framework.

However, with the release of Laravel 8, releases v1.1.14, v1.2.8, v1.3.8 and v1.4.8 are the last releases including new features for the corresponding Laravel 5.x versions (bugfix support is still active for that versions). 2021-02-13 UPDATE: some last features for v1.1+ releases are still ongoing :)

v1.0 requires Laravel 5.1, 5.2, 5.3 and 5.4 (no longer maintained and not tested versus laravel 5.4, however the usage of the package is the same as for 1.1)

Installation

Add gecche/laravel-multidomain as a requirement to composer.json:

{
    "require": {
        "gecche/laravel-multidomain": "4.*"
    }
}

Update your packages with composer update or install with composer install.

You can also add the package using composer require gecche/laravel-multidomain and later specify the version you want (for now, dev-v1.1.* is your best bet).

This package needs to override the detection of the HTTP domain in a minimal set of Laravel core functions at the very start of the bootstrap process in order to get the specific environment file. So this package needs a few more configuration steps than most Laravel packages.

Installation steps:

1. replace the whole Laravel container by modifying the following lines at the very top of the bootstrap/app.php file.

//$app = new Illuminate\Foundation\Application(
$app = new Gecche\Multidomain\Foundation\Application(
    $_ENV['APP_BASE_PATH'] ?? dirname(__DIR__)
);

2. update the two application Kernels (HTTP and CLI).

At the very top of the app/Http/Kernel.php file , do the following change:

//use Illuminate\Foundation\Http\Kernel as HttpKernel;
use Gecche\Multidomain\Foundation\Http\Kernel as HttpKernel;

Similarly in the app/Console/Kernel.php file:

//use Illuminate\Foundation\Console\Kernel as ConsoleKernel;
use Gecche\Multidomain\Foundation\Console\Kernel as ConsoleKernel;

3. Override the QueueServiceProvider with the extended one in the $providers array in the config/app.php file:

        //Illuminate\Queue\QueueServiceProvider::class,
        Gecche\Multidomain\Queue\QueueServiceProvider::class,

4. publish the config file.

php artisan vendor:publish 

(This package makes use of the discovery feature.)

Following the above steps, your application will be aware of the HTTP domain in which is running, both for HTTP and CLI requests, including queue support.

Usage

This package adds three commands to manage your application HTTP domains:

domain.add artisan command

The main command is the domain:add command which takes as argument the name of the HTTP domain to add to the application. Let us suppose we have two domains, site1.com and site2.com, sharing the same code.

We simply do:

php artisan domain:add site1.com 

and

php artisan domain:add site2.com 

These commands create two new environment files, .env.site1.com and .env.site2.com, in which you can put the specific configuration for each site (e.g. databases configuration, cache configuration and other configurations, as usually found in an environment file).

The command also adds an entry in the domains key in config/domains.php file.

In addition, two new folders are created, storage/site1_com/ and storage/site2_com/. They have the same folder structure as the main storage.

Customizations to this storage substructure must be matched by values in the config/domain.php file.

domain.remove artisan command

The domain:remove command removes the specified HTTP domain from the application by deleting its environment file. E.g.:

php artisan domain:remove site2.com 

Adding the force option will delete the domain storage folder.

The command also removes the appropriate entry from, the domains key in config/domains.php file.

domain.update_env artisan command

The domain:update_env command passes a json encoded array of data to update one or all of the environment files. These values will be added at the end of the appropriate .env.

Update a single domain environment file by adding the domain option.

When the domain option is absent, the command updates all the environment files, including the standard .env one.

The list of domains to be updated is maintained in the domain.php config file.

E.g.:

php artisan domain:update_env --domain_values='{"TOM_DRIVER":"TOMMY"}' 

will add the line TOM_DRIVER=TOMMY to all the domain environment files.

domain.list artisan command

The domain:list command lists the currently installed domains, with their .env file and storage path dir.

The list is maintained in the domains key of the config/domain.php config file.

This list is automatically updated at every domain:add and domain:remove commands run.

config:cache artisan command

The config:cache artisan command can be used with this package in the same way as any other artisan command.

Note that this command will generate a file config.php file for each domain under which the command has been executed. I.e. the command

php artisan config:cache --domain=site2.com 

will generate the file

config-site2_com.php 

Further information

At run-time, the current HTTP domain is maintained in the laravel container and can be accessed by its domain() method added by this package.

A domainList() method is available. It returns an associative array containing the installed domains info, similar to the domain.list command above.

E.g.

[ 
   site1.com => [
       'storage_path' => <LARAVEL-STORAGE-PATH>/site1_com,
       'env' => '.env.site1.com'
   ]
] 

Distinguishing between HTTP domains in web pages

For each HTTP request received by the application, the specific environment file is loaded and the specific storage folder is used.

If no specific environment file and/or storage folder is found, the standard one is used.

The detection of the right HTTP domain is done by using the $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] PHP variable.

Customizing the detection of HTTP domains

Starting from release 1.1.15, the detection of HTTP domains can be customized passing a Closure as the domain_detection_function_web entry of the new domainParams argument of Application's constructor. In the following example, the HTTP domain detection relies upon $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] instead of $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'].

$domainParams = [
    'domain_detection_function_web' => function() {
        return \Illuminate\Support\Arr::get($_SERVER,'HTTP_HOST');
    }
];

//$app = new Illuminate\Foundation\Application(
$app = new Gecche\Multidomain\Foundation\Application(
    $_ENV['APP_BASE_PATH'] ?? dirname(__DIR__), null, $domainParams
);

Using multi domains in artisan commands

In order to distinguishing between domains, each artisan command accepts a new option: domain. E.g.:

php artisan list --domain=site1.com 

The command will use the corresponding domain settings.

About queues

The artisan commands queue:work and queue:listen commands have been updated to accept a new domain option.

php artisan queue:work --domain=site1.com 

As usual, the above command will use the corresponding domain settings.

Keep in mind that if, for example, you are using the database driver and you have two domains sharing the same db, you should use two distinct queues if you want to manage the jobs of each domain separately.

For example, you could:

• put in your .env files a default queue for each domain, e.g. QUEUE_DEFAULT=default1 for site1.com and QUEUE_DEFAULT=default2 for site2.com
• update the queue.php config file by changing the default queue accordingly:

'database' => [
    'driver' => 'database',
    'table' => 'jobs',
    'queue' => env('QUEUE_DEFAULT','default'),
    'retry_after' => 90,
],

• launch two distinct workers

 php artisan queue:work --domain=site1.com --queue=default1

and

 php artisan queue:work --domain=site1.com --queue=default2

Obviously, the same can be done for each other queue driver, apart from the sync driver.

storage:link command

If you make use of the storage:link command and you want a distinct symbolic link for each domain, you have to create them manually because to date such command always creates a link named storage and that name is hard coded in the command. Extending the storage:link command allowing to choose the name is outside the scope of this package (and I hope it will be done directly in future versions of Laravel).

A way to obtain multiple storage links could be the following. Let us suppose to have two domains, namely site1.com and site2.com with associated storage folders storage/site1_com and storage/site2_com.

1. We manually create links for each domain:

ln -s storage/site1_com/app/public public/storage-site1_com 
ln -s storage/site2_com/app/public public/storage-site2_com 

2. In .env.site1.com and .env.site2.com we add an entry, e.g., for the first domain:

APP_PUBLIC_STORAGE=-site1_com

3. In the filesystems.php config file we change as follows:

'public' => [
    'driver' => 'local',
    'root' => storage_path('app/public'),
    'url' => env('APP_URL').'/storage'.env('APP_PUBLIC_STORAGE'),
    'visibility' => 'public',
],

Furthermore, if you are using the package in a Single Page Application (SPA) setting, you could better handling distinct public resources for each domain via .htaccess or similar solutions as pointed out by Scaenicus in his .htaccess solution.

Storing environment files in a custom folder

Starting from version 1.1.11 a second argument has been added to the Application constructor in order to choose the folder where to place the environment files: if you have tens of domains, it is not very pleasant to have environment files in the root Laravel's app folder.

So, if you want to use a different folder simply add it at the very top of the bootstrap/app.php file. for example, if you want to add environment files to the envs subfolder, simply do:

//$app = new Illuminate\Foundation\Application(
$app = new Gecche\Multidomain\Foundation\Application(
    $_ENV['APP_BASE_PATH'] ?? dirname(__DIR__),
    dirname(__DIR__) . DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR . 'envs'
);

If you do not specify the second argument, the standard folder is assumed. Please note that if you specify a folder, also the standard .env file has to be placed in it

Default environment files and storage folders

If you try to run a web page or an shell command under a certain domain, e.g. sub1.site1.com and there is no specific environment file for that domain, i.e. the file .env.sub1.site1.com does not exist, the package will use the first available environment file by splitting the domain name with dots. In this example, the package searches for the the first environment file among the followings:

.env.site1.com
.env.com
.env

The same logic applies to the storage folder as well.

About Laravel's Scheduler, Supervisor and some limitation

If in your setting you make use of the Laravel's Scheduler, remember that also the command schedule:run has to be launched with the domain option. Hence, you have to launch a scheduler for each domain. At first one could think that one Scheduler instance should handle the commands launched for any domain, but the Scheduler itself is run within a Laravel Application, so the "env" under which it is run, automatically applies to each scheduled command and the --domain option has no effect at all.

The same applies to externals tools like Supervisor: if you use Supervisor for artisan commands, e.g. the queue:work command, please be sure to prepare a command for each domain you want to handle.

Due to the above, there are some cases in which the package can't work: in those settings where you don't have the possibility of changing for example the supervisor configuration rather than the crontab entries for the scheduler. Such an example has been pointed out here in which a Docker instance has been used.