How to Access the Control Panel from an Alternate Domain

If you’d like to access Craft’s control panel from an alternate domain or subdomain—meaning one that differs from the public site—you’ll need to configure your web server and tell Craft how to handle URLs.

In the example below, we’re pretending your-domain.com is the public-facing site, and cp-domain.com is used for accessing the control panel. (The configuration would be the same if you were using a subdomain as your alternate, like cp.your-domain.com.)

1. Configure the alternate domain on your server. #

Have your server route requests for cp-domain.com to the same web root (e.g. your web/ folder) as your main site.

Once that’s configured correctly, you should be able to access your control panel from https://cp-domain.com/admin. (If you’ve given your site a custom CP trigger word, replace admin with that.)

You may notice at this stage that your site’s front-end is also accessible at the control panel domain—we’ll fix that in step 3.

2. Tell Craft to use your alternate domain for control panel URLs. #

Craft needs to know what control panel URLs should look like, so it can generate them accurately across control panel, site, and CLI contexts.

This is controlled by the baseCpUrl config setting, which can be added to config/general.php…

return [
    'baseCpUrl' => 'https://cp-domain.com',
    // ...
];

…or as an environment override:

CRAFT_BASE_CP_URL="https://cp-domain.com"

The base CP URL should not include the CP trigger word (e.g. /admin).

3. Set or remove the cpTrigger #

If the alternate domain is used exclusively for the Craft control panel (and not a secondary site, as well), set cpTrigger to null to avoid displaying the site’s front end at your control panel domain:

return [
    'baseCpUrl' => 'https://cp-domain.com',
    'cpTrigger' => null,
    // ...
];

This can also be accomplished by setting the CRAFT_CP_TRIGGER environment override to an empty string.