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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!

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  • I hope you are aware that D6 is no longer supported; therefore, D6 will never ever get any security updates from drupal.org. So /topic4 (everything else) will potentially be vulnerable to getting hacked. – No Sssweat May 16 '17 at 23:31
  • Yes, and we're rapidly moving to D8. But it's a huge site, and there's a lot of custom modules to move so, unfortunately, we do have to keep it for now. – softwareseattle May 16 '17 at 23:39
  • What webserver are you running? nginx, apache? – David Thomas May 17 '17 at 0:25
  • We're running Apache. – softwareseattle May 18 '17 at 20:15
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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.

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