I have a huge Drupal 6 site, and a small, newer partial version of the site on Drupal 8. Instead of migrating, we decided to build a brand new site from scratch.
Is it possible to host the site such that:
http://www.sitename.com takes user to --> new D8 site
http://www.sitename.com/topic1 /topic2 takes user to new site.
http://www.sitename.com/topic3 /topic4 (everything else) takes user to old D6 site?
Thanks!
You can use a reverse proxy for this, both Apache and Nginx support this. What you do is that you make the Drupal 6 site available on a different URL. This might be even a local url, like sitename2.local. Add this to the hosts file on your server (/etc/hosts on Linux) and point it to 127.0.0.1. Make sure you set up a virtual host in your webserver to point sitename2.local to the root directory of your Drupal 6 site.
By using a reverse proxy you tell your webservice to forward calls to /topic/4 to sitename2.local/topic/4 and return it to the user, just like a proxy. In Nginx it should look something like:
location /topic/4 {
proxy_pass http://sitename2.local/topic/4;
}
For Apache you need to enable the proxy modules:
> a2enmod
> proxy proxy_ajp proxy_http rewrite deflate headers proxy_balancer proxy_connect proxy_html
Your virtual host file should look something like this:
<VirtualHost *:*>
ProxyPreserveHost On
ProxyPass /topic/4 http://sitename2.local/topic/4
ProxyPassReverse /topic/4 http://sitename2.local/topic/4
(...)
</VirtualHost>
If you Google around for reverse proxy you will find tons of information on how to exactly configure them.
