How to use WordPress Wildcard Subdomains on Plesk 9.x Hosting

11 Nov 2010 Gaz 6 comments

In WordPress MU (WPMU), and in WordPress 3.x, webmasters can enable subdomain mode to create sub-sites of the main domain name (e.g. support.example.com as opposed to example.com/support/), but there has been a lot of online searching and discussion about why it apparently does not work with Plesk Panel hosting management control panel. This article provides the full answer, and the solution.

cPanel v Plesk hosting management control panel

There is already a lot of help and support on the internet for webmasters whose hosting service or servers use the cPanel control panel to manage their web-hosting environment, and countless tutorials for setting up the wildcard subdomain settings needed for WPMU and WordPress 3.x with multisite enabled (WP-MS).

However, there are almost no resources to help webmasters when their hosting service provide Parallels Plesk Control Panel instead of cPanel, and Plesk, apart from doing many things differently, has several quirks that do not exist in cPanel hosting.

The standardised instructions included for both WPMU and WP-MS for enabling sub-blogs / sub-sites work fine for cPanel based hosting, but do not for Plesk Panel based hosting, unless you are thoroughly familiar with Plesk’s idiosyncrasies. Several main developers at WordPress have repeatedly blamed hosting company incompetence when less skilled webmasters have sought help on the topic. The fault however, appears to lie not with the hosting companies, but with Parallels (the publishers of Plesk).

In October 2008, Parallels pushed out a knowledge-base article giving instruction for how to create a wildcard subdomain in Plesk. This was before the rise of WPMU, and long before WP-MS was thought of. It works fine for some scripts, but not with a network-enabled WordPress installation.

A year later, in October 2009, Parallels posted their official workaround to allow wildcard subdomains in a way that did not kill off browser-based webmail services for the hosted domain (see below), this being due to structural changes in the configuration of the Plesk 9.x series. Again this does not resolve the virtual wildcard subdomains requirements of WordPress.

Since then, there has been much discussion on WordPress.org’s forums, and some on Parallels’ forums about this topic, but no solution provided publicly – - – until now.

The rest of this article provides what I hope is a straight forward, step-by-step guide to getting wildcard subdomain mode enabled on Plesk-based web hosting. It’s recommended you follow it step-by -step rather than jumping ahead to the bits you’re looking for.

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Server Side DNS wildcards, how-to, Plesk 9.x, subdomain network, wildcard subdomains, WordPress MU, WordPress MultiSite, WPMS, WPMU

Comments

Written by manoo about 2 years ago.

Hi, thk u for the tuts..

im getting “not found” message while i tried to login into network site

ie “test.primarydomain.com/wp-admin” gives 404 error..? wats wrong ?

mine is linux +plesk 9.0.1 cloud
Written by Gaz about 2 years ago.

Hi Manoo

There’s not quite enough info there to give a “for sure” answer.

Can you log into your domain.com/wp-admin and see the test subdomain site in SuperAdmin – Sites?
From there can you go to the back-end?
In the test site back-end, in the Settings – General page, what does it say is the url of the test sub-site? (This will tell you if your install is set up for subdomain or subdirectory configuration).

Server side, do you have access as root admin, or are you using shared hosting?
Either way, are you sure all four steps of the instructions have been followed?
- rename the mail service files in /etc/httpd/conf.d/
- add the lines to /var/www/vhosts/domain.com/conf/vhosts.conf
- add the wildcard entry *.domain.com to DNS
- Re-saved the permalinks in the home blog Settings – Permalinks (is htaccess writable by WordPress or is it telling you to manually add the config lines, and did you do that?)

If you’ve done all that, andit’s still not showing with a direct login attempt, but is showing when accessing through the home site admin, try re-saving the permalinks from the sub-site admin Settings – Permalinks. It’s possible it might need a nudge to get it registered.

Was this a clean build to subdomains, or were you trying to migrate a subdirectory network to subdomains (that might introduce other issues that I’ve not found yet, because I’ve not tried it).

Let me know how you get on.
Gaz

Edit : Just remembered – I read somewhere (I think it was in the WPMU 2.9x release notes) that it’s not possible to switch between subdirectory and subdomain modes, it requires WordPress to be re-installed to do that – I’ll need to check if that’s still the case in WordPress 3.x
Written by Gaz about 2 years ago.

Hi Manoo

Just discovered a missing element on one of the MultiSite installs on my VPS – I’ve no idea why this kicked in on my latest site migration, because it didn’t on any of the others.

in /vhosts/domain.com/conf/httpd.include (file) make sure the bottom / last lines of your VirtualHost directive (for both SSL and non-SSL) is something like this -
Include /var/www/vhosts/example.com/conf/vhost.conf < /VirtualHost >
Obviously, use your own domain name, not example.com and note there should be no spaces in the VirtualHost closing tag – I have to add them on here, or WordPress wont show the tag.

When you restart Apache after adding the vhost.conf file, that line should be added automatically, but sometimes is not – again, I’ve currently no idea why that happens, it might be version specific. After you’ve added that line, restart Apache again.

On this particular migration, I found that without that line manually added to the httpd.include file, browsing to a subsite from admin caused a non-existing page error, while browsing to it in public side went straight to AtMail login. The manifestation you see might be different depending on your server setup. But if you see weird, mixed results like this, check your httpd.include file is actually calling the vhost.conf file.

Gaz
Written by Dave Thom about 1 year ago.

Gaz, thanks a mill for this, I’d been struggling with plesk and WPMS, subdomain always went to the plesk default “construction” page – turns out the http.include had no directive to read vhost.conf (despite saying that was what to edit at the top of the http.include file).
cheers, probably saved me a couple of weeks of digging
Dave
Written by Gaz about 1 year ago.

Hi Dave

Glad it helped you resolve your install – remember to add the call to vhosts.conf to both the http and the https sections of your http.include, especially if you’re telling Plesk to use the same folder for them both.

Give a shout back if you hit any hiccups like Manoo did.

Gaz
Written by manoo about 1 year ago.

Heey all..

After making changes in vhost.conf and others .. Make sure to run the following commands

/usr/local/psa/admin/bin/websrvmng -av ( if your server is plesk 9.0.1 + linux )

/etc/init.d/httpd reload

WordPressing

How to use WordPress Wildcard Subdomains on Plesk 9.x Hosting

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