Multi-Site

Pro Feature

Statamic's multi-site capabilities are designed to manage a single site or site network with multiple localizations, variations, or sections running on one or more domains or subdomains. It can be used to manage translations, country-specific versions of a company site, and other similar use cases. It is not intended to be used for multi-tenant applications.

Overview

Statamic can be configured to handle multiple "sites". A site is a way of managing a localized version of your content - whether another language, region, or even company/brand (think Proctor & Gamble).

Each site can have different base URLs:

  • domains: hello.com and bonjour.com
  • subdomains: example.com and fr.example.com
  • subdirectories: example.com and example.com/fr/

More details on how to convert to a multi-site setup

Configuration

Let's look at a full site configuration and then we'll explore all of its options.

# config/statamic/sites.php
 
return [
'sites' => [
'default' => [
'name' => config('app.name'),
'locale' => 'en_US',
'url' => '/',
'direction' => 'ltr',
]
]
];

Sites

Every Statamic install needs at least one site. Building zero sites is a bad way to build a website and clients will probably challenge any invoices.

Locale

Each site has a locale used to format region-specific data (like date strings, number formats, etc). This should correspond to a the server's locale. By default Statamic will use English – United States (en_US).

Hot Tip!

To see the list of installed locales on your system or server, run the command locale -a.

Language

Statamic's control panel has been translated into more than a dozen languages. The language translations files live in resources/lang.

You may specify which language translation to be used for each site with the lang setting.

Note that both Statamic and Laravel don't ship with frontend language translations out of the box. You have to provide your own string files for this. There is a great package called Laravel Lang containing over 75 languages that can help you out with this.

URL

URL is required to define the root domain Statamic will serve and generate all URLs relative to. The default url is /, which is portable and works fine in most typical sites. Statamic uses a little magic to work out what a full URL is be based on the domain the site is running on.

Best Practice

It can be a good idea to change this to a fully qualified, absolute URL. This ensures that server/environment configurations or external quirks interfere with that "magic". Using an environment variable is an ideal solution here.

php 'sites' => [ 'en' => [ // ... 'url' => env('APP_URL') ], 'fr' => [ // ... 'url' => env('APP_URL').'fr/' ] ]

env # production APP_URL=https://mysite.com/ # development APP_URL=http://mysite.test/

Text Direction

All sites are Left-To-right (ltr) by default, and you may omit the setting entirely. But if any of your sites is in a rtl text direction (like Arabic or Hebrew), you may define the direction in the config and use it on your front-end wherever necessary.

'sites' => [
'en' => [
'name' => 'English',
],
'he' => [
'name' => 'Hebrew',
'direction' => 'rtl',
]
]
<html dir="{{ site:direction }}">
Hot Tip!

Statamic's direction is ltr by default. You only need to set direction when your site is rtl.

Additional Attributes

You may also add an array of arbitrary attributes to your site's config, which can later be accessed with the site variable .

'sites' => [
'en' => [
'name' => 'English',
'attributes' => [
'theme' => 'standard',
]
],
]
<body class="theme-{{ site:attributes:theme }}">
Hot Tip!

Nothing fancy happens here, the values are passed along "as is" to your templates. If you need them to be editable, or store more complex data, you could use Globals.

Adding a Site

To add another site to an existing multi-site installation, add another array to the $sites configuration array along with the desired settings.

'sites' => [
'en' => [
'name' => 'English',
//
],
'de' => [
'name' => 'German',
//
],
];

Renaming a Site

If you rename a site handle, you'll need to update a few folders and config settings along with it. Replace {old_handle} with the new handle in these locations:

Content Folders

  • content/collections/{old_handle}/
  • content/globals/{old_handle}/
  • content/trees/{old_handle}/

Collection Config YAML Files

# content/collections/{collection}.yaml
sites:
- {old_handle}
- de
- fr

Per-Site Views

Views can be organized into site directories.

If a requested view exists in a subdirectory with the same name as your site, it will load it instead. This allows you have site-specific views without any extra configuration.

# config/statamic/sites.php
 
'sites' => [
'site_one' => [ /* ... */ ],
'site_two' => [ /* ... */ ],
]
resources/views/
site_one/
home.antlers.html
home.antlers.html
page.antlers.html

For example, given template: home, Statamic will load site_one/home because that view exists in the subdirectory. If you were to have template: page, it would load the one in the root directory because there's no site-specific variant.

Hot Tip!

This feature can be combined with the AMP feature. You can nest an amp view subdirectory inside a site subdirectory.

Template Snippets

Here are a few common features you'll likely need to template while building a multi-site.

Building a Site Switcher

This will loop through your sites and indicate the current site as the active one. Check out all the available variables inside the sites loop.

{{ sites }}
<a class="{{ site:handle === handle ?= 'active' }}" href="{{ url }}">
{{ handle }}
</a>
{{ /sites }}

Declaring the Page Language

Indicate the current language of the site by setting the lang attribute on your <html> tag (most likely in your layout view), or the container element around translated content if the page mixes and matches languages.

<html lang="{{ site:short_locale }}">

Static Caching

If your multi-site should use static caching, you will also need to add additional config parameters and different server rewrite rules. Please refer to the related section of the static caching documentation for the correct settings.

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