Using WordPress Multisite with domain mapping and Let's Encrypt certificates

[GERMANORONOZ]

Hello everyone.

First of all, this is my first post in the forum so sorry if I am on the wrong thread or this topic has been discussed before (I've searched in the forums and found some related threads, but none of them was useful for my case).

This is my server info:

DELL PowerEdge™ R720
Intel Xeon E5-2620V2
HDD 3x HDD 3 TB
HDD 1x SSD 600 GB
RAM 8x RAM 16384 MB DDR3 ECC (Total 128GB RAM)

Debian 8.0 64-bit
Directadmin Version: 1.50.1
NGINX-Apache (reverse proxy)
PHP 7.0.9

I am running a WordPress multisite network in which I use domain mapping to point all the domains to the multisite install.

For this two work, I had 2 options: to use domain pointers or to use custom httpd configurations.

I need the domains not only to be pointed to the network, but also have email accounts, so I chose the second option.

Let's suppose the network is at MULTISITEDOMAIN.com with IP xx.xxx.xxx.17.

So, for each of the new sites on the network, I follow this steps:

1. Create a new user for the new domain (NEWDOMAIN.com) and assign a secondary IP (xx.xxx.xxx.55)
2. Go to MULTISITEDOMAIN.com custom httpd configurations and add new server aliases for both Apache and NGINX (I had to slightly modify some templates –nginx_server_secure_sub.conf, nginx_server_secure.conf, nginx_server_sub.conf and nginx_server.conf– inside the custom folder for this to work)
3. Map the domain with the "Domain Mapping" plugin from WordPress

This way everything works without SSL, good!

I can't use domain pointers because if I have already created the user for that domain DirectAdmin says "You cannot use that domain as a pointer. It already exists on the server".

I could use domain pointers and use a different server for the email purposes, that would be ok for me also, just FYI.


The problem now is that if I login with the new user (NEWDOMAIN.com) and create a SSL cert with Let's Encrypt the cert gets created ok, but it is on the secondary IP and obviously it does not work.

This is the workaround I found about it, but after trying I could not manage to make it work: http://forum.directadmin.com/showthread.php?t=32487&p=163832#post163832

My questions:

• Anyone have an idea on how to make this to work?
• Which is better, to use custom httpd configurations or domain pointers?
• Would the performance be affected if we have hundreds or thousands of domains? (we currently have around 40)

I'd like a solution that in the future, if we hopefully have lots of new domains could let us to develop a script to automate everything (domain pointer creation, Let's Encrypt cert creation and domain mapping), just like WordPress.com does. It is OK for us at the moment to do this by hand per domain.

Thanks a lot to everyone in advance.

Best regards!

 

[zEitEr]

Hello,

Add domains as usually under the same useraccount and use sim-links between public_html and private_html to share files between domains.

 

[GERMANORONOZ]

[SOLVED] Thanks a lot!!

Woah! That was easy!
Thank you very much, I appreciate it.

It worked.

Regards