Multiple Sites with One SSL Certificate :: Blog

Multiple Sites with One SSL Certificate

(posted at 2010-01-20 20:38:05 UTC)

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There's two ways of doing this that I use; one is fairly clean:

• Get a wildcard certificate (*.example.com)
• Put all of your sites as subdomains (eg foo.example.com, bar.example.com)

While it "just works", it restricts your choice of domains; an alternative solution, which isn't really suitable for your users, but fine if you just want secure access to an admin panel (your blog, PhpBB, etc) on several different domains, you can hack something together with Apache, mod_proxy, mod_rewrite, and some cookies:

Header set Cache-Control "max-age=0, no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate"
Header set Pragma "no-cache"
Header set Expires "Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000"

RewriteEngine on

RewriteRule ^unset$ https://example.com/ [L,R=301,CO=site:example.com:example.com]

# foo.example.com
RewriteRule ^foo$ https://example.com/ [L,R=301,CO=site:foo:example.com]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_COOKIE} site=foo
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://foo.example.com/$1 [L,P]

# bar.example.com
RewriteRule ^bar$ https://example.com/ [L,R=301,CO=site:bar:example.com]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_COOKIE} site=bar
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://bar.example.com/$1 [L,P]

If you install the above as ".htaccess" in the root of https://example.com, then https://example.com/foo will make https://example.com/ act as a proxy for http://foo.example.com, https://example.com/bar will make https://example.com/ act as a proxy for http://bar.example.com, and https://example.com/unset will make it display whatever it normally displays.

I hope someone finds this useful.

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