Transparent proxy from node.js app to WordPress for /blog route

For a recent car wash directory start up I have created, I wanted a blog.

GetCarClean uses node.js;

While there are node blogging platforms, what I really wanted to do, was proxy /blog of my main site, to a WordPress site (actually hosted on a subdomain – blog.<domain>.com)

What I did, was to set up the WordPress blog on the separate server, ensuring my styles etc… are in my ‘main’ site css

Then, in my Express route, I used the express-http-proxy module, and configured it as follows:

app.use('/blog', proxy('blog.domain.com', {
    forwardPath: function(req, res) {
        return require('url').parse(req.url).path;
    }
}));

This now transparently proxies from /blog to the subdomain!

Getting header / footer content from separate resource

I created a separate route for the header & footer of the site, so that these always stay ‘in sync’ with the main site.
This stops the need to update these sections in WordPress – I can simply leave WordPress to manage my blog posts.

To pull in the content, I use the following (footer.php example)

<?php
  $c = curl_init('http://www.domain.com/content/footer');
  curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

  $footerhtml = curl_exec($c);

  if (curl_error($c))
      die(curl_error($c));

  $status = curl_getinfo($c, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);

  curl_close($c);
?>
  
<footer id="footer">
<? echo($footerhtml) ?>
</footer>

This retrieves the content from the provided url, and spits it out in my template.

Redirecting to /blog from .blog subdomain

One thing I am currently stuck on;
If a user visits blog.domain.com – I want them to be redirected to www.getcarclean.com/blog

I’ve got a htaccess set up for this, and I”m almost there.

Please see this StackOverflow question for more details:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/29866797/redirect-if-request-uri-did-not-come-from-subdirectory-of-main-domain

WordPress Settings

Below, are the settings I used for the WordPress URLs, to ensure URLs are re-written correctly