Rewrite HOST without redirecting to the rewritten hostname, is that possible?

Question

I only have one virtual host available with my service provider the folder structure is similar to this:

• domains

  • primarydomain.ext

    • stat
    • www
    • secondary (<- this is the folder for "secondary.primarydomain.ext")

I have the domain "primarydomain.ext" registered and working. I have a second domain "secondary.ext" registered somewhere else, and pointing to the same web server. The service provider allowed this and now it acts like an alias to primarydomain.ext. I want to use mod_rewrite to internally rewrite "secondary.ext" to "secondary.primarydomain.ext" and process it like that (with the folder named secondary as the root).

The url in the browser should stay "secondary.ext"! The solution I have works, it stores the following in a .htaccess file located inside the "primarydomain.ext" folder but updates the browser URL to "secondary.primarydomain.ext":

RewriteEngine On 

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} secondary.ext$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://secondary.primarydomain.ext [L]

How can I fix this so that the browser URL is not updated, or whatever other solution gives me the desired effect?

(as a note: my provider is not able (does not want) to create a new virtual host for domains that are not registered by them, so they pointed me to this solution, but do not offer support for it.)

Answer 1

The answer is to not try and change HOST, but to change the path used to find files locally.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} secondary.ext$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /domains/primarydomain.ext/secondary$1 [L]

Edit If you're getting an infinite loop, add another condition to exclude requests already in the secondary folder after the HTTP_HOST condition and before the Rule:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/secondary/.*

Answer 2

Changing the host will always cause Apache to create an external redirect.

Absolute URL
If an absolute URL is specified, mod_rewrite checks to see whether the hostname matches the current host. If it does, the scheme and hostname are stripped out and the resulting path is treated as a URL-path. Otherwise, an external redirect is performed for the given URL. To force an external redirect back to the current host, see the [R] flag below.

See http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_rewrite.html#rewriterule