This is all taking place on a LAMP stack within a <VirtualHost *:80> context. I'm using
RedirectPermanent / https://www.example.com/
to redirect all http requests to https. I also have old incoming broken "http://..." links which I want to redirect, and this seems like the best place to do them, rather than on the https side, which would involve sending a pointless redirect to a not-found https page.
If I stack Redirects like this:
RedirectPermanent /specific/2020/url1.php https://example.com/2021/url1.html
RedirectPermanent /specific/2020/url2.php https://example.com/2021/url2.html
RedirectPermanent /specific/2020/url2.php https://example.com/2021/url3.html
RedirectPermanent / https://example.com/
Is there any potential for conflict between the "url#" redirects and the "/" redirect?
I can't find anything in Apache's documentation to explain how these rules would be interpreted in combination. Does a pattern match for "url1" terminate the script in the way, for example, that the "L" flag does with RewriteRule ?
Or is there the possibility that the "/" -> https line gets applied because it matches also?
I think I've found the answer here:
https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_alias.html
The doc says:
First, all Redirects are processed before Aliases are processed, and therefore a request that matches a Redirect or RedirectMatch will never have Aliases applied. Second, the Aliases and Redirects are processed in the order they appear in the configuration files, with the first match taking precedence.
I'd prefer more explicit wording, but I interpret this as saying when a match occurs, the subsequent Redirects are ignored.
Related
I have this RedirecMatch
RedirectMatch 301 ^/en/products/(.*)/(.*)/(.*)$ https://www.example.com/en/collections/$2/
If I visit
https://www.example.com/en/products/sofas/greyson/greyson-sofa
I'm redirected to
https://www.example.com/en/collections/greyson/greyson-sofa
What I want is
https://www.example.com/en/collections/greyson/
How do I accomplish this?
There's nothing obvious in what you have posted that would produce the specific output you are seeing, however, there are other errors in the directives and you may be seeing a cached response. 301s are cached persistently by the browser, so any errors are also cached.
The Redirect directive is prefix-matching and everything after the match is copied onto the end of the target URL. So, the redirect you are seeing would be produced by a directive something like this:
Redirect 301 /en/products/sofas/greyson https://www.example.com/en/collections/sofas/greyson
When you request /en/products/sofas/greyson/greyson-sofa, the part after the match, ie. /greyson-sofa, is copied onto the end of the target URL to produce /en/collections/sofas/greyson/greyson-sofa
You can resolve most of these issues by reordering your rules (but also watch the trailing slashes). You need to have the most specific redirects first. RedirectMatch before Redirect. For example, take the following two redirects:
Redirect 301 /en/products/accessories https://www.example.com/en/products/complements/
Redirect 301 /en/products/accessories/bush/ https://www.example.com/en/collections/bush-on/
Since the Redirect directive is prefix-matching, a request for /en/products/accessories/bush/ will actually be caught by the first rule, not the second and end up redirecting to /en/products/complements//bush-on/ - note the erroneous double-slash (since you have a mismatch of trailing slashes on the source and target URLs.)
You need to reverse these two rules. (But also watch the trailing slash.)
The same applies to the Redirect directives that follow. You also have some duplication, ie. You have two rules for /en/products/chairs-and-bar-stools/piper/?
Been trying to play with mod_rewrite through .htaccess in one Xampp virtualhost, but I am not getting the results that I am looking for.
What I am tring to do is to rewrite the following: www.example.com/name/billy.html to: www.example.com/billy
Without trying to rewrite the URLs the virtualhost is working fine, I have access to all pages. However, when I add the .htaccess with the corresponding rewrite rule I get a 404 page not found. The regex is working as expected though. I see that the request to www.example.com/name/billy.html it's been rewritten to www.example.com/billy, but the page doesn't load.
The name folder exists in the file structure and the .htaccess is inside the example folder.
Currently, my vh configuration looks like this:
<VirtualHost *:80>
DocumentRoot "/Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/htdocs/example"
ServerName www.example.com
<Directory "/Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/htdocs/example">
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks ExecCGI Includes
AllowOverride All
Require all granted
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>
And this is the content of the .htaccess file:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^name\/([a-z]+).html$ /$1 [L,NC,R]
What is missing?
What I am tring to do is to rewrite the following: www.example.com/name/billy.html to: www.example.com/billy
You seem to have the process the wrong way round and possibly mixing up "rewrites" and "redirects"?
You should be internally rewriting from the visible "friendly" URL to the underlying file-path that actually handles the request. You are trying to do the opposite here. How is your system expected to handle a request for /billy? (It doesn't, and generates a 404.)
You may be thinking you can change the URL using .htaccess (mod_rewrite) alone? But no, that is not how this works.
RewriteRule ^name\/([a-z]+).html$ /$1 [L,NC,R]
You mention "rewrite", but this directive is in fact a "redirect" (as indicated by the R flag). Specifically, a 302 (temporary) redirect in this instance.
(You might actually want to implement a redirect like this, if you are changing an existing URL structure, but more on that later*1)
A URL "rewrite" is entirely internal to the server. The user only sees the public URL, they do not see the URL that it might be rewritten to. You (the user) can't "see" a rewrite.
A "redirect" on the other hand, usually refers to an external redirect, ie. a 3xx response sent back to the client with an instruction to make a new request to a different URL. The URL being redirected to is visible to the user. This is used when content has moved to a different URL.
So, following your example, you should be requesting/linking to (in your HTML source) the short/friendly URL /billy and internally rewriting the request to /name/billy.html that actually handles the request.
For example:
RewriteEngine On
# Rewrite from "billy" to "name/billy.html"
RewriteRule ^[a-z]+$ name/$0.html [NC,L]
The $0 backreference contains the entire URL-path that is matched by the RewriteRule pattern.
Only use the NC flag if you do need to match uppercase letters as well. But a request for /Billy won't serve /name/billy.html on a case-sensitive OS.
And that's really it, with regards to the URL-rewritting, you can stop reading here.
*1 Redirect from old to new
Regarding the external "redirect" mentioned above. You might choose to implement a redirect (in the opposite direction) if you are changing an existing URL structure and the old URLs have been indexed by search engines and/or linked (or bookmarked) to by external third parties - in order to preserve SEO and keep users happy.
For example, say your original URLs were of the form /name/billy.html and you later decided to change your URLs to /billy instead. You first change the URLs in the HTML source and implement the "rewrite" as mentioned above so the new URLs now work. You then might implement an external redirect from the old /name/billy.html URL to the new /billy URL.
For this, you would use a directive like you had initially, except you have to be careful of redirect-loops because you are already rewriting the request in the opposite directive. You only want to redirect "direct/initial" requests and not rewritten requests by the earlier rewrite (that is actually later in the file). An easy way to check for "direct" requests is to check against the REDIRECT_STATUS environment variable, which is empty on the initial request and set to 200 (as in 200 OK status) when the request is rewritten.
For example, the following "redirect" would go before the above "rewrite", immediately after the RewriteEngine directive:
# Redirect from "name/billy.html" to "/billy"
RewriteCond %{ENV:REDIRECT_STATUS} ^$
RewriteRule ^name/([a-z]+)\.html$ /$1 [R=301,NC,L]
This should ultimately be a 301 (permanent) redirect since the URL has presumably changed permanently. However, always test with 302 (temporary) redirects to avoid potential caching issues.
Further reading:
Reference: mod_rewrite, URL rewriting and "pretty links" explained
I registered a expired domain to forward all incoming links to another domain. The problem is: many inlinks are placed on subdomains, for example: axa-art.cdn.contento-v41.eu/axa-art/0eee9cec-58cb-45b2-a4e2-b5f73920068e_091216_axa+art_classic+car+study_de_rz.pdf
I am looking for a 301 redirect rule in htaccess that forward any url (no matter on main domain or subdomain) to "new-url.tld"
axa-art.cdn.contento-v41.eu
axa-art.cdn.contento-v41.eu/slug
any-subdomain.contento-v41.eu
any-subdomain.contento-v41.eu/slug
all of this example above should
forward to this exact URL: new-domain.tld
Question 1:
Is it possible to create a "general" rule and place it into htaccess of the main directory?
Question 2:
Or do i have to write a specific rule for each subdomain?
Question 3:
Do I have to create a sub-directory and create a separate htaccess in every sub-directory for each subdomain I want to add redirection-rules?
Help or suggestions are highly appreciated. Thank you very much for your help in advance.
This isn't just a .htaccess question. In order for your server to receive requests to <any-subdomain>.example.com the necessary DNS and server config directives need to be in place. If the request doesn't reach your server then you can't implement a redirect in .htaccess.
So, I suspect that these subdomains are not even resolving?
You either need to create the necessary DNS A records and ServerAlias directives one by one for each hostname (ie. subdomain) or create a "wildcard" DNS A record (and ServerAlias *.example.com directive in the vHost). But then you still have an issue with these hostnames being covered by an SSL cert if you need to redirect from HTTPS.
You can then create the necessary redirect in .htaccess. Although, since you need access to the server config (or a using a control panel that does this for you) to implement the directives above, you should also implement this redirect in the server config also.
For example, at the top of your .htaccess file, before the existing directives (or in your vHost):
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^new\.example$
RewriteRule ^ https://new.example%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]
The above states... for any request that is not for new.example then 301 redirect to https://new.example/<same-url>.
However, if you have access to the server config and this other domain is configured in its own vHost container then the redirect can be simplified:
Redirect 301 / https://new.example/
UPDATE#1:
this rule does forward any URL form the main domain to the new domain.
# Permanent URL redirect- by netgrade
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !https://www.marco-mahling.de/$
RewriteRule $ https://www.marco-mahling.de/ [R=302,L]
The rule I posted above should probably replace your existing rule entirely.
Yes, your rule does redirect every URL to the root of the new domain, but it is arguably incorrect. The RewriteCond directive is superflous and isn't actually doing anything. The REQUEST_URI server variable contains the URL-path, it never contains the scheme + hostname. So, the RewriteCond directive you've posted will always be successful.
If that is the rule you currently have then it would already redirect everything. In which case your problem would seem to the necessary DNS and server config directives as mentioned above.
From your directives, I assume that the other domain actually points to a different server (or different vHost on the same server). Otherwise, this would have resulted in a redirect-loop. In which case, you only need the much simpler Redirect directive that I posted above.
UPDATE#2: That works fine BUT the incoming links are still not forwarded cuz of a "%" in the url: https://axa-art.cdn.contento-v41.eu/axa-art%2F0eee9cec-58cb-45b2-a4e2-b5f73920068e_091216_axa+art_classic+car+study_de_rz.pdf
It's actually because of the %2F - an encoded slash (/) in the URL-path. By default, Apache will reject such URLs with a 404 (for security reasons).
To allow encoded slashes in the URL you would need to set AllowEncodedSlashes On in the server config (or vHost container). You cannot set this in .htaccess. (The server generated 404 occurs before .htaccess is even processed.)
However, I would express caution about enabling this feature. (Is there a specific requirement here? Are you recreating these documents on the new server?)
If this request was intended to map directly to a PDF file on disk then this actually looks like an incorrectly URL encoded request, since a slash / is not a permitted filename character on either Windows or Linux.
If you enable AllowEncodedSlashes then the above RewriteRule will redirect the request to /axa-art/0eee9cec....pdf - note the %-decoded / in the resulting URL. You would need to take additional steps to maintain the URL-encoding (if that was required), but as I say, that looks like a mistake to begin with.
I'm setting up apache 2.4 (docker) as a reverse-proxy to distribute different subdomains to different docker services. I redirect http-requests to https using the Redirect directive. One specific URL-path (the part after the domain), however, should not be redicted to https, but served with files from a specific directory. I'm trying to accomplish this using the Alias directive, which does not work.
I'm assuming that Redirect overrides Alias. Is that true?
And how could I accomplish my goal if this is the case?
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName service.example.com
Alias /exception/ /var/www/exception
Redirect permanent / https://service.example.com/
</VirtualHost>
I expected this to work, but it does not.
From mod_alias docs:
First, all Redirects are processed before Aliases are processed, and
therefore a request that matches a Redirect or RedirectMatch will
never have Aliases applied. Second, the Aliases and Redirects are
processed in the order they appear in the configuration files, with
the first match taking precedence.
To make sure that /exception/ is not matched, use RedirectMatch which allows regex patterns:
RedirectMatch permanent "^/(?!exception/)(.*)" "https://service.example.com/$1"
I want to redirect one URL to another without changing the Browser URL
www.example.com/abc/(.*).xml should redirect to www.example.com/abc/xyz/index.htm?file=$1
But the Browser should display www.example.com/abc/(.*).xml
You can use a RewriteRule:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule /abc/(.*)\.xml$ /abc/xyz/index.htm?file=$1 [L]
Make sure you have mod_rewrite enabled and put this either in your VirtualHost config, or in a .htaccess file in your DocumentRoot
As Constantine posted on the accepted solution, the [P] flag is dangerous as it converts the server as a proxy.
See [this]: https://serverfault.com/questions/214512/redirect-change-urls-or-redirect-http-to-https-in-apache-everything-you-ever?noredirect=1&lq=1
P = Proxy. Forces the rule to be handled by mod_proxy. Transparently provide content from other servers, because your web-server fetches it and re-serves it. This is a dangerous flag, as a poorly written one will turn your web-server into an open-proxy and That is Bad.