Rails - Mar 2005 - Determining the hostname

I''m working on a small Rails application which needs to behave 
differently based on the domain name provided to it.  (It''s a 
special-purpose search engine which needs to have a different look and 
use a different database for each virtual host.)

The problem we''ve hit is we can''t find a clean way to
determine the
hostname from inside the controller class.  I wasn''t able to find 
anything in the documentations I found.  Right now we''re running a
Regex
on @url.rewrite.to_s, which feels kinda dirty.  Is there a clean way to 
determine the hostname?

Thanks for any answers or (even better) pointers to documentation along 
these lines.  Everyone in the office is kind of a Rails-n00b.

Pete

How about looking at the env hash provided in the @request object.

e.g. @request.env["REQUEST_URI"]

http://rails.rubyonrails.com/classes/ActionController/Base.html

Or this if you want to do something like what BaseCamp does:

http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/show/HowToUseSubdomainsAsAccountKeys

On Tue, 2005-03-22 at 18:46 -0800, Pete Elmore wrote:
> I''m working on a small Rails application which needs to behave 
> differently based on the domain name provided to it.  (It''s a 
> special-purpose search engine which needs to have a different look and 
> use a different database for each virtual host.)
> 
> The problem we''ve hit is we can''t find a clean way to
determine the
> hostname from inside the controller class.  I wasn''t able to find 
> anything in the documentations I found.  Right now we''re running a
Regex
> on @url.rewrite.to_s, which feels kinda dirty.  Is there a clean way to 
> determine the hostname?
> 
> Thanks for any answers or (even better) pointers to documentation along 
> these lines.  Everyone in the office is kind of a Rails-n00b.
> 
> Pete
> _______________________________________________
> Rails mailing list
> Rails-1W37MKcQCpIf0INCOvqR/iCwEArCW2h5@public.gmane.org
> http://lists.rubyonrails.org/mailman/listinfo/rails

Pete Elmore wrote:
> The problem we''ve hit is we can''t find a clean way to
determine the
> hostname from inside the controller class.  I wasn''t able to find
> anything in the documentations I found.  Right now we''re running a
Regex
> on @url.rewrite.to_s, which feels kinda dirty.  Is there a clean way to
> determine the hostname?
@request.host gives you the hostname.  @request.domain and
@request.subdomains split it into convenient parts.

Use a before_filter in ApplicationController to do domain-specific
setup.  Say you want to load site settings from the database:

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  before_filter :load_site_for_domain

  protected
    attr_reader :site
    helper_method :site

    def load_site_for_domain
      @site = Site.find_by_domain(@request.domain)
    end
end

jeremy

Thanks for the responses!  That was exactly what we were looking for.

Pete