htaccess, site and staging in subdirectories

Question

I have the following task and as it is a little different from most setups, I couldn't find any hints that solved my problem.

WordPress for the live site was installed into a subfolder /wp1, the .htaccess directives are a rewrite to www and https followed by the usual WP directives:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
# rewrite any request to the certified domain to use www
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]

# rewrite to HTTPS
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]
</IfModule>


<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

and index.php in the root loads the necessary wp1/wp-blog-header.php.

Now I need to set up a staging environment in /wp2 with wp2 as the subdomain. The subdomain does not have a SSL-certificate (but I could easily get one). I tried several modifications in order to redirect the subdomain to the staging site without https, but all I got so far was errors.

Although I am not that familiar with .htaccess, I think the first problem is the wildcard redirect to www. The second obstacle is the redirect to https. I need them both for production.

Is there a way to skip those rules in case the subdomain is addressed?

Or in general, how would you go about that?

Answer 1

Assuming the /wp2 subdirectory containing the staging site has its own WordPress .htaccess file (with the standard WordPress front-controller, see below). Then the .htaccess in the document root should contain something like the the following, above any existing directives, to rewrite all requests to the wp2 subdomain to the /wp2 subdirectory:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(wp2)\.example\.com
RewriteRule (.*) /%1/$1 [L]

Then, the "standard" WordPress front-controller would be in the /wp2/.htaccess file (this also prevents a potential rewrite loop):

RewriteEngine On

RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . index.php [L]

Note that I have removed the RewriteBase directive entirely and removed the slash prefix on the last RewriteRule substitution. This is so that it will load index.php from /wp2/index.php and not the document root. (Which is really how I would expect the main site in /wp1 to be configured.)