My partner Greg posted a cool tip on his blog that I wasn’t aware of, or if I was I had forgotten about. It involves previewing a domain that is a “work in progress” using the Plesk Control Panel. This is something that can come in pretty handy while developing a website as well as for client demo’s. As some of you might know, this feature is pretty easy to do in Ensim, which was our first control panel solution back in the day before migrating all of our servers and vps’s to Plesk across the board.
Since moving from an Ensim control panel to Plesk I have had trouble many times with previewing works-in-progress on sites that do not yet have the DNS pointed to them. This was not an issue in Ensim as you could use the IP address in the URL to create a direct pathway to the site as it is under construction. Plesk, unfortunately will not allow you to do this and will only allow a site preview from within the control panel. It finally dawned on me the other day that I could use the Plesk domain alias feature to solve this problem.
Set up the domain in Plesk, as you normally would. Next go to Domains > Domain Alias > Add domain alias. From this point add a subdomain against any domain you like, like project.yoursite.com. Next go to your registrar/DNS manager and point the appropriate subdomain to the IPA of the host server.
That’s it, nothing else to it.
Source: Preview a non-live site in Plesk | Greg Smart
I’ve been searching for ages for a solution like this. Would you mind elaborating on “Next go to your registrar/DNS manager and point the appropriate subdomain to the IPA of the host server.”
Many thanks
David – we manage our dns with a tool called tinydns, but we also use enom (our registrar) to manage our nameservers. Everyone manages their DNS differently, however you go about doing this is going to depend on where/how you manage your DNS for your websites. This trick works well, we have used it lately for several projects and it get’s the job done! Even for installing software like wordpress, etc.
What does “IPA of the host server” mean?
IP Address
It’s been a while since this post, but I will dig through my notes and see what I might can find and post back later.