Alright this is a super weird request and it's just a stopgap measure until the client cleans up their many web properties, so no need to tell me that it's a convoluted way to do things. Current setup:
example.com is registered with GoDaddy but points to a Squarespace
site (CNAME & A records, etc)
sub.example.com is a Wordpress site on Godaddy hosting
Question: Can I make the WP site at sub.example.com instead appear as example.com/sub? If so, how?
I can set the site_url and home_url in WP, and I can set up a forwarding rule from Squarespace to the IP of the GoDaddy shared hosting account. Would that be enough?
I had thought I would need to set an A record with the host as example.com/sub, but slashes aren't allowed. Any insight greatly appreciated. Thanks for reading!
the only way to get this done that I am aware, is to use some form of land balancer, e.g.:
AWS Elastic Load balancer
Nginx / apache proxy
AWS CloudFormation custom backends
last option will also speed up your site.
Unless your DNS provider have some custom option, DNS alone can't do that.
Related
My setup:
Bitnami Wordpress
GCP VM
GCP HTTPs Load Balancer
Load Balancer has http to https redirection, www to non-www redirection
Cloud CDN
Main Problem:
The VM's external IP (22.22.22.22) is indexed by Google Search. I'm unable to remove it from Google Search because it is not recognized as a property that belongs to me and the indexed page (http://22.22.22.22/home) is live. http://22.22.22.22/home is resolved to example.com which is a live page.
what I have checked
The domain name and Load Balancer's IP is properly resolved
No new mod_rewrite rules other than those from the default installation
The site does not have any reference to VM's external IP, including database
No cache plugins installed
Wordpress's site address and home address is pointing to http://example.com
what I have done to rectify
I've added 301 redirects which I'm not sure if that helps. It will take some time to check if that works.
My questions
Is there a way to prevent Google from indexing IPs(Any IPs in general)?
How to prevent VM's ext. IP from being indexed by Google especially when load balancer is in use?
There is a simple solution but it takes time. Configure the Apache web server to redirect IP-based queries to your domain or return an error. Google Search will eventually notice the redirect and remove the IP address from search queries.
For redirects, use a permanent redirect (301).
301 Moved Permanently
How To Create Temporary and Permanent Redirects with Apache and Nginx
There are WordPress plugins to do the same, but I prefer to configure Apache directly and not add another plugin to a site.
Is there a way to prevent Google from indexing IPs(Any IPs in
general)?
No, Google can index any site, IP or Hostname based, that is public unless restricted via robots.txt.
Introduction to robots.txt
How to prevent VM's ext. IP from being indexed by Google especially
when load balancer is in use?
You can create a VPC Firewall rule that only allows traffic from the load balancer and blocks Internet ingress traffic.
Load Balancer Firewall Rules
Additional information:
Remove a page hosted on your site from Google
Backend: "Bitnami WordPress with NGINX and SSL Stack for Google Cloud Platform" from marketplace.
I used this guide: https://www.am22tech.com/google-cloud-cdn-wordpress/
I ended up with a somewhat working system as follows:
My Domain ->(google managed cert)-> CDN + Load Balancer -> Instance Group ->(http)-> VM with bitnami stack.
All works well and seems very fast. The biggest gap in my understanding is how the VM can be told it needs to behave as if it's the original domain.
For example, in the nginx server config, any kind of reference to $host seems to return the VM's IP address or something like that.
Also, in wordpress, in a lot of places the domain is replaced by an IP address, even though the site URL and wordpress address show up correctly. This isn't a wordpress question though, as I'm quite sure there is a more general solution I'm missing to do perhaps with NGINX or the load balancer configuration. I think PHP detects the host and passed it along to wordpress but I'm not clear how.
I found a reference somewhere in the google documentation how to manually assign a domain to a VM but not sure that's what's needed here.
Further to this, I'm totally unclear how I would set up https between the vm and the load balancer, yet only have one domain/ip address for the global forward rule. Maybe a separate question.
Bitnami Engineer here. If you already have the domain, certificates and the Load Balancer in place, you will need to configure WordPress to use that domain name as default domain of the application. You will need to edit the wp-config.php file and configure these lines
define('WP_SITEURL', 'http://DOMAIN/');
define('WP_HOME', 'http://DOMAIN/');
More info: https://docs.bitnami.com/google/apps/wordpress-pro/administration/configure-domain/
In case you also want NGINX to redirect you your domain, no matter how you access your app's information, you can add this configuration line
return 301 https://DOMAIN$request_uri;
in the /opt/bitnami/nginx/conf/bitnami/bitnami.conf file
More info: https://docs.bitnami.com/google/apps/wordpress-pro/administration/force-https-nginx/
I had better luck having the load balancer talk to my VM with https. Once I got that working, I didn't have to make any changes to wp-config.php. In this case I didn't bother with varnish because I think it only supports http. I'm hoping google's CDN will be sufficient regarding caching, and I may try a helper plugin in wordpress.
To redirect http to https, I followed the bitnami instructions to set up to front ends to the load balancer pointing to the same static ip address, then in my nginx server blocks, I added a redirect line in the https block (not the http block), since the google load balancer communicates with my backend via https. Google sets the http_x_fowward_proto to http so I check that and redirect if necessary.
if ($http_x_forwarded_proto = "http") { return 301 https://$host$request_uri; }
The bitnami stack is amazing, everything seems extremely fast!
Here is the situation:
I have a static website hosted by AWS S3(www.mysite.com), however, I want to also attach a blog to a sub-path with in my domain (www.mysite.com/blog) which uses wordpress on an EC2 instance.
How would I go about it?
Yes, this can be done, but you need to understand why the solution works the way it does.
A domain name points to a single logical endpoint, which handles all requests for the domain. If certain paths are handled by one system and other paths are handled by another one, then a single system must be in charge of routing those requests, and routing them through itself.
You cannot configure how paths are handled using DNS.
In my answer to Can I use CloudFront to serve a WordPress blog from the same domain, but a different server? (at Server Fault), I gave an overview of how this can be done in an AWS-centric solution. CloudFront, in addition to providing caching, is a reverse proxy, and that's fundamentally what you need, here: a reverse proxy to examine each request and select the correct back-end server. There are other solutions, such as using HAProxy in EC2 to handle request routing but they are more complex and may not perform as well in all cases.
You configure a CloudFront distribution with two origin servers (your bucket's web site endpoint and the Wordpress server), and use two cache behaviors so that /blog* goes to Wordpress and everything else goes to the bucket. Then you configure your domain name as an alternate domain name on the CloudFront distribution, and point your domain name to CloudFront in DNS.
The slightly tricky part here is that the wordpress site must be rooted at /blog and not at / because CloudFront will actually send the /blog (at the beginning of the path) to the WP machine, so it needs to expect that. CloudFront uses the path prefix to select the origin server (by finding the matching cache behavior for that path), but it can't remove the path prefix.¹
Wordpress is not my specialty, the this appears to require some WP configuration changes that appear to be fairly straightforward.
¹ CloudFront can't remove the path prefix. This will change when Lambda#Edge launches, which is an integration of CloudFront and Lambda functions, allowing server-side examination and manipulation of request and response headers from within the CloudFront infrastructure, but even when that is a available, it will still be advisable to configure WP to not be at the root, for simplicity.
By a different subdomain, I'm assuming that you want the blog to be at blog.mysite.com. I think that is the only way to go (you cannot use a /blog but will have to use a subdomain). In that case, following steps should work:
Create an Elastic IP and attach it to the EC2 instance
Configure the EC2 WP instance to respond to blog.mysite.com
In the DNS provider of www.mysite.com, point the A record of blog to point to the Elastic IP of the EC2 instance
Right now I have a domain ex: foobar.com hosted on Bluehost.
I created an instance on AWS and fortunately, I used (wordpress by bitnami) to migrate my foobar.com to the aws site.
I created an elastic ip and associated it with my instance.
This is where I am stuck. I've read tons of tutorials telling me to go into my Bluehost and add a DNS record which I haved.
My first attempt was to do a URL redirect on foobar.com, which worked but only for the homepage because when I would navigate to another page, it would display the elastic ip (ex: 53.13.153.12/about).
I am unsure how to go about this problem.
Setup an A Record, not a URL redirect. You'll need to then configure the vhost on your server to understand that domain (I think you may have already done this step).
Bluehost has some documentation here
I have installed WordPress on a subdomain that currently resides on an unpropogated domain. (It can only be accessed via IP address.) Is it possible for me to access any subdomains that have been created, eg: subdomain.mysite.com/wp-admin via IP, or do I have to wait till the domain has been propogated?
This is my first question, I apoligize if I have not explained my self thoroughly enough. Thanks in advance for any help.
you can use http://[IP]/~[username]/[domain.tld]/ to access your site by IP.
Where [IP] is the IP of your server and [username] is your username for the hosting site. [domain.tld] is the name of the folder on which you have mapped your subdomain.
You may be able to check it with an anonymous proxy?
I use http://anonymouse.org/anonwww.html to check sites as in Australia it normally takes a little longer to propagate over to here.
Please note: You will only be able to check it's existence, you would not use this to make site modifications through the back end. That would best be done once the domain propagates.
Hope this helps ;)