setting up a site in a subdirectory under /public_html/ ??

right up front, i don’t do much with server setup htaccess type stuff... that being said, here is what i’d like to do.

i am working on a new site for someone whose /public_html/ is quite messy (all static stuff), and i’d like to create my modx site under /public_html/modx/, and then when it’s approved to launch, i’d like to have all www web traffic pointed into that /modx/ directory (without "modx" appearing in the url of course). can this be done via .htaccess?

what’s the best method? i know while developing i’ll have this:

in the /public_html/modx/.htaccess, but when it’s ready to launch is there something i can put in an .htaccess file in /public_html/ to point that to the /modx/ directory, but not have "modx" appear in the url?

i had tried something like this on a previous project:

which put me into the correct subdirectory, but i still have "modxrevo" in the url, unfortunately i had to bail on this because the site had to be launched "yesterday", so i literally couldn’t spend a minute more on it, and ended up just putting everything in /public_html/.

any insight would be greatly appreciated! thanks!

At a glance, I think all you need to do is change [tt][L][/tt] to [tt][R, L][/tt], perhaps [tt][R=301, L][/tt] would be better. In fact, if this is co-existing with MODx’s htaccess code, you may need to omit the [tt]L[/tt] for friendly urls to work properly.

I would seriously reconsider moving your web root.

A better idea would be to move all of the non-essential html files out of the public_html directory into a backup folder, rather than move the web root via htaccess which could turn out to be a maintenance nightmare for you.

Edit:
Of course you will need to take into consideration any documents or files that might be linked from elsewhere or indexed in search engines. I would not just move html files haphazardly.

thanks for the reply, i was picturing taking all the "stuff" that’s currently in the /public_html/ directory and moving that into another sub directory, so in the end the /public_html/ would look something like this:

/public_html
--->/modxrevo
--->/old_stuff
--->.htaccess (the one that bumps all www traffic into the /modxrevo directory)

does this seem like a good/bad/ugly solution? i should add, this isn’t my server, and i don’t have complete access to it, so this would be done via ftp as much as possible, so i can’t really get ’up’ from /public_html/

I’d also just move it in the webroot. After all, that’s what the webroot is for, right?

Backup the rest of the files and either delete or put in a sub dir.


If you’re worried about missing files, you could get the Notify404 plugin (which I wrote) which will send you an email if MODX serves a 404 error. (everything: so prepare for loads of emails) so you could use something like Redirector to create redirects for the 404’s to the new site.. Not ideal, but certainly functional.