Testing Django apps using localhost subdomains

3 July 2010

This turned out to be quite a bit easier than I'd imagined. Here are the things I did:

I saved Dave Fowler's subdomain middleware as middleware.py in my project directory:

class SubdomainMiddleware:
    def process_request(self, request):
        '''Parse out the subdomain from the request'''
        request.subdomain = None
        host = request.META.get('HTTP_HOST', '')
        host_s = host.replace('www.', '').split('.')
        if len(host_s) > 2:
            request.subdomain = ''.join(host_s[:-2])

I added this to my project's MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES:

MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = (
    ...,
    'middleware.SubdomainMiddleware',
)

I edited my /etc/hosts file as per Dave's suggestion:
```
127.0.0.1 test.com
127.0.0.1 blog.test.com
127.0.0.1 search.test.com
```
Initially I replaced test.com with the site's domain name, but I decided that it's useful to be able to access both the live site and the test site without editing the /etc/hosts file.

At this point I expected everything to work as advertised. Instead, I got this:

That would depend on one's definition of "works". I wanted my Django site to appear, which required a very simple tweak…
I added the port number to the address:
```
http://test.com:8000/
```
This actually worked. :)

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