Integrating another site at the host level

Publishing help Hosting
1

Just wondering if this is possible with Webflow. We have a directory of people that we built in Gatsby with Airtable.

Instead of migrating it directly to the other sites where we want to use it we have integrated it in two ways: the first, which I know will work in WebFlow is to use an embed

The second, which we have working at both Vercel and Cloudflare Pages, allows us to basically to use “rewrites” to “mount” the /directory from this Gatsby host without changing anything. I’m sure that this feature is possible with your hosting solution, but is it something that can be exposed for us to use?

Here is my site Read-Only: LINK
(how to share your site Read-Only link)

2

Hey Tim, there are only two ways to do path rewrites;

  1. Export your Webflow site and host it on a server that supports rewrites.
  2. Host your site on Webflow’s hosting, but setup a reverse proxy to control your paths.

Both require a degree of technical knowedge and skill, and have pros and cons, so I’d only embark on these if that feature is really important to your site.

3

Thanks @memetican - where can I see where to setup the reverse proxy? The feature is really important - and we are weighing the options between moving all of the functionality inside of webflow vs doing something like this.

4

Webflow does not offer this service (reverse proxy) so this is something you need to provide yourself.

5

Someone recently announced a new product that may do what you need. I haven’t tried it and I don’t know the company, but the feature set looks like a fit for you.

Otherwise, if you search the forums here for “reverse proxy” you’ll find a bunch of posts on the topic.

6

Please note that we were able to do this very easily with a CloudFlare worker and made it even easier when we moved to using their workers routes.

7

Just to update you on this @memetican - in case you, or anyone else, has additional advice.
Please note that we understand that there is a conflict between the proxy-ssl version of Webflow and Cloudflare - we’re hoping we can find a way past it as we use Cloudflare for almost everything!

We were able to put into place simple proxies that allowed us to integrate our two applications as subdirectories of any site out there (let’s call them /a and /b). This was not hard. We also proved it working with everything going through the worker and proxying webflow through the worker. But it turned out that none of this really mattered when we got into Custom Domains and Ecommerce …

Everywhere we ended up turning, we eventually got blocked, so I’m hoping I can get a bit more detail about next steps.

Example 1: add Custom Domains:

No ecommerce, proxying proxy.webflow.com - having our cloudflare workers fire, everything works well.

  • This gave us both of our applications in their subdirectories: /a and /b
  • This was not a problem because we were not trying on proxy-ssl.webflow.com

Example 2: add Ecommerce

Introduce ecommerce

  • The workers were firing, so our subdirectory apps worked fine at /a and /b
  • Immediately we got a multiple redirect problem with the main website.
  • I really wish this part worked - it would make things the easiest and aligns with most other hosting options …

Example 3: use multiple webflow sites

We setup two sites at Webflow: one for the static content, and one for the ecommerce store - and try to proxy the store. So this was:

  • main webflow content management site: www.mydomain.com
  • store webflow ecommerce site: /store
  • other apps /a and /b

This has a variety of other problems including the href prefix work not functioning well with it in the subdirectory.

Example 4: use a worker at Cloudflare:

We setup a worker to handle all communication and proxy everything from the previous example #2

In this case:

  • worker routes were setup with /a and /b - working perfectly
  • www.mydomain.com was the worker
  • we proxied the entire webflow site.

If the custom domains are turned off on the Webflow side, this actually got closest to working but the ecommerce functionality did not work: obviously we get a 401 error when trying to download the CSRF token.

Re-Summary:

Ultimately the question is how can we actually accomplish this with these requirements? I’m down for any solution that will allow our proxy-ing to work properly.

Requirement is this so that it’s clear:

  • Single Webflow site supporting ecommerce: https//www.mydomain.com
  • Two proxied applications mounted at /a and /b - currently done in Cloudflare - could move it to whatever technology will work.

Any additional details around reverse proxy approach that I’ve read works? What app should be used? Can someone confirm this is actually working for them with the SSL and CSRF token issues reported previously?