Multiple domain names but one code-base (Actix-web)?

help
1

Hello

In a previous web-project of mine I had a website where multiple businesses could register. They each had their own subdomain. E.g: business1.example.com, business2.example.com,...

They all had the same page but only the data was relative to the business.

My HTML/Askama:

<html>
    ...
    <span id="business-name">{{ name }}</span>
    ...
</html>

My database table was like this:

+----+-----------+------------------+
| ID | subdomain |       name       |
+----+-----------+------------------+
|  1 | business1 | My Business 1    |
|  2 | business2 | Another business |
+----+-----------+------------------+

And when my site was visited, I retrieved the Host-Headers and checked for the subdomain. If the subdomain of the request matched with a row in my table, I'd display the data of that business. So business1.example.com would return the following HTML:

<html>
    ...
    <span id="business-name">My Business 1</span>
    ...
</html>

This worked fine. I used a wildcard SSL-certificate to allow all subdomains.

Now I want to do the same, but with full domains. When a business registers I will buy a domain name. And in the DNS-records I will make an A-record pointing to the server where my Actix/Web project runs. This means that multiple domain names like for example business1.com and business2.com will all refer to 84.1.1.1 (my VPS IP).

When a request comes I can check from what domain-name it comes. My database-table will be as follow:

+----+---------------+------------------+
| ID |    domain     |       name       |
+----+---------------+------------------+
|  1 | business1.com | My Business 1    |
|  2 | business2.com | Another business |
+----+---------------+------------------+

I'll retrieve the host-headers from the request and check if the domain-name exists in my database. If it does, I'll show the name of that business.

This way, I could have one code-base and one HTML-file but allow businesses to have their own domain-name.

My question:

  • Is this possible in Rust/Actix-web?
  • Did I overlook something?
  • How would this work for SSL-certificates? Can I just, when a business registers, add a SSL certificate for that domain name to Ngix?
  • Is there a better way to do this?
2

I would just setup a reverse proxy in Nginx pointing to a specific route in Actix-web.

3

Where will you host your app? In case you use k8s or OpenShift, you could use cert-manager to manage ssl certificates. All you have to do is add domain names to your cert-manager when you also add them to your DNS. Other than the certificates I don't see a problem with your setup. You can use the Uri type to extract the URI of your request including the host name and map the host to a business in your database.

4

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