Serving static content from subdomain with codeigniter? - codeigniter

Question

I’m in the process of splitting resources across domains. I’ve read a few different ways on how to handle this. From what I’ve read the correct way to handle is to use absolute paths versus relative. If this is true, how would I handle this as I push my local development live? The domains won’t match from local to live.
The base_url allows for a single domain only as far as I’ve read. Should I create an asset path helper and autoload that? Or, is there something I’m missing here?
http://www.example.com would operate normally.
http://images.example.com/assets would point to my asset folder that exists in the root.

Answer 1

Yeah, you're missing the part where the server configuration points stuff to certain places depending on the request that's made. This is before the request gets anywhere near codeigniter, so take a look at your server software manual and see what's up with that.
An example with Apache virtual hosts might be something like
#httpd.conf:
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName example.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/http
ErrorLog /var/log/httpd/error_log
TransferLog /var/log/httpd/access_log
</VirtualHost>
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName images.example.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/http/assets
ErrorLog /var/log/httpd/error_log
TransferLog /var/log/httpd/access_log
</VirtualHost>
In this example, a request to http://images.example.com/radical.gif would look in /var/www/assets/ for a gif called radical.

Answer 2

You could define a constant in config/constants.php for your assets url and use it:
define('ASSETS_URL', 'http://images.example.com/assets/');
Then of course you would go for it like that:
<img src="'.ASSETS_URL.'image1.png" />

Answer 3

After further research this is the way I solved my problem. Thanks to the Codeigniter forum for helping me get to this solution. Create a switch that checks which stage of development the site is in and set the base_url and asset_url config accordingly.
switch(ENVIRONMENT) //set in index.php
{
case 'development':
$config['base_url'] = 'http://localhost/';
$config['asset_url'] = 'http://localhost/assets/';
break;
case 'production':
$config['base_url'] = 'http://yoursite.com/';
$config['asset_url'] = 'http://assets.yoursite.com/';
break;
}
Then just extend the url_helper and create a function to get the asset_url
if ( ! function_exists('asset_url'))
{
function asset_url($uri = '')
{
$CI =& get_instance();
return $CI->config->item('asset_url') . ltrim($path, '/');
}
}