My question is to ask if the level of domain name control I'd like with .htaccess is even possible, and how it might be achieved.
Here's the current situation. At the moment I have a main domain (call it primary.com) that has several language variants, under a file structure like
/lang/chinese
/lang/russian
etcetera. I decided to create a sub-domain for just one of them, so now I have china.primary.com. Of course I created a .htaccess file to make all variants of primary.com and www.primary.com point to the same place (www.primary.com), and now also china.primary.com points to www.primary.com/lang/chinese. Everything works well.
Next I added a second domain (secondary.com) as a 'parked' domain on the site. A little fight with .htaccess and now I have all requests for any version of secondary.com being rewritten as a call to www.primary.com. All good. Then comes the final finesse that is the nub of my question.
While I have anything.secondary.com point to www.primary.com at the moment, is it possible to add in an exception for the possible case where a user tries to access china.secondary.com? In that event I'd like it rewritten to china.primary.com and pointed at www.primary.com/lang/china.
Note I have not created a sub-domain china.secondary.com as my understanding is that it shouldn't be necessary. I think this either can or can't be done through .htaccess alone. Please excuse my iinexperience: what I have works but has been copy & pasted together as a result of finding various examples online. Here is what I have that works well right now - except the final line I added that because I hoped it would solve this, but it doesn't work.
Do I actually have to create a sub domain china.secondary.com for this to work? If so my goal is dead in the water since I cannot create a subdomain on a parked domain, I believe.
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^primary.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.primary.com$1 [L,R=301]
RedirectMatch 301 ^/lang/chinese/(.*)$ http://china.primary.com/$1
RewriteCond %{http_host} ^secondary\.com [nc]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.primary.com/$1 [R=permanent,nc,L]
RedirectMatch 301 ^/lang/chinese/(.*)$ http://china.primary.com/$1
Steered in the right direction by Anubhava I researched this question even more. It seems a basic assumption of mine was incorrect. It looks like you do need to create a subdomain in order to steer people away from it with .htaccess. Seems deeply counter-intuitive to me, but there it is.
Of course I cannot create a sub-domain on a domain that is merely parked with a hosting company, so attempting to support users who mistype a specific subdomain.parkeddomain.com (where they meant to type subdomain.maindomain.com) is in fact, not possible. Very surprising to me indeed, but I learnt something of value. Thank you all those that looked in on this.
Related
I have a website, let's say fruit.com, and currently I have a bunch of redirects set up that work just fine, so for example fruit.com/apples/mcintosh will redirect to fruit.com/apples.php?id=mcintosh.
I also used to have some redirects set up to allow me to use a short URL, so fru.it/mcintosh would redirect to fruit.com/apples.php?id=mcintosh.
So far so good. A few years ago, though, my short domain lapsed and I didn't renew. Recently I've purchased it again and I'm interested in getting the same setup back.
Now, though, the redirects from the short domain to the main domain aren't working, although I've used exactly the same code, so I'm at a bit of a loss for what's going wrong.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.fru\.it$
RewriteRule ^([0-9]+)$ "http\:\/\/www\.fruit\.com\/apples.php?id=$1" [R=301,L]
although I've used exactly the same code
But the code you've posted won't redirect the stated example URL fru.it/mcintosh, since the code matches digits only, not letters.
Try the following instead:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.fru\.it
RewriteRule ^(\w+)$ http://www.fruit.com/apples.php?id=$1 [R=301,L]
The \w shorthand character class matches upper and lowercase letters, numbers and underscore.
You don't need all the backslash-escapes in the substitution string.
Also bear in mind that the order of these directives can be important. This rule would likely need to go near the top of the .htaccess file to avoid conflicts.
Test first with a 302 (temporary) redirect to avoid potential caching issues. Clear your browser cache before testing.
Aside:
fruit.com/apples/mcintosh will redirect to fruit.com/apples.php?id=mcintosh
It would seem to make more sense that this would be a (internal) "rewrite", not a (external) "redirect"? The shortcode would then redirect to fruit.com/apples/mcintosh, not fruit.com/apples.php?id=mcintosh?
I tried to search this but due to the search terms I can not find an answer anywhere.
My visitor tracking site (I use Piwik) can not decipher between the following issue below.
example.com./ vs example.com/
example.com./ when types in to find a website is of course wrong, somehow others get to my site and every page they visit shows as an external link and this ./ problem.
How can I in .htaccess (in my root of my domain) add a rule to fix this problem and possibly others that are similar to this?
This is not something that is fixable from htaccess, as the example.com. hostname is invalid and any request for that will never reach your server. There's no way to rewrite outgoing requests from the browser to piwik because those requests have nothing to do with your server and thus anything htaccess wouldn't be applicable.
You need to figure out why browsers are sending tracking information to piwik with the hostname example.com.. Just as a wild uneducated guess, it may have to do with some inelegant appending of hostname and badly formed relative URI's like <a href="./my/page.html">. So when the code unintelligently appends them together, you get example.com./my/page.html.
Try using the HTTP_HOST variable, something like the following might work.
RewriteEngine on
Rewritecond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.example\.com\.
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
I was wondering how I would do a complex mod_rewrite. Below is basically how I want it done.
If the user goes to:
-http://files.stuff.example.txt.r.site.com/doc.txt
Then the server would rewrite the url to:
-http://r.site.com/index.php?type=txt&username=example&dir=files.stuff&file=doc.txt
Better picture:
-http://[dir3-dir2-dir1].[username].[type].r.site.com/[file]
Rewrites to:
-http://r.site.com/index.php?type=[type]&username=[username]&dir=[dir3.dir2.dir1]&file=[file]
I created a colour coded image to clearly show what I mean:
(can't embed images) look here:
http://i.stack.imgur.com/24H8j.png
The first subdomains are a directory structure (shown in red), so the amount of subdomains can change.
I hope someone can provide me with a solution. Either using mod_rewrite or maybe another method. Thanks.
Provided that you have configured your DNS so that requested URL hits server where your application is (maybe wildcard DNS on your domain: *.site.com -> 123.45.67.89, if supported by your DNS server/hosting), you can create more or less complicated rewrite rule. I'd do it this way:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(.*).r.site.com$
RewriteCond $1 !^index.php
RewriteRule (.*) index.php?subdomain_part=%1&file_part=$1
So in index.php you get $_GET['subdomain_part'] and $_GET['file_part'], which you can parse further to extract parameters according to your convention.
Of course, you can write more complicated regex to get URL parts extracted by mod_rewrite (I'm not such an regex expert myself). However doing parsing in PHP would be much easier and you can do better error handling (e.g. if URL is not formed properly).
I'm having some trouble with Apache's mod_rewrite. One of the things I'm trying to get it to do is hide some of my implementation details, so that, for example, the user sees the URL http://www.mysite.com/login but Apache responds with the page at http://www.mysite.com/doc_root/login.php instead (preferably without showing the user that it's a PHP file or the directory structure). Here's what I have in my .htaccess file:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www.)?mysite.com*
RewriteRule ^/(\w+) /doc_root/$1.php [L]
#Redirect http://www.mysite.com to the login page
RewriteRule ^/?$ https://www.mysite.com/doc_root/login.php
But when I go to http://www.mysite.com/login, I get a 404 error even though the page exists. I clearly don't have a great understanding of how the mod_rewrite conditionals and rules work, so can anyone please tell me what I'm doing wrong? Thanks.
Take doc_root out of all the stuff you have it in. That will give you the result you're asking for. However I'm not sure if it's desired or not. How are you going to force someone to login if they manually type http://www.mysite.com/index.php?
Also if you're trying to force all traffic to SSL it's better to use a second VirtualHost and Redirect instead of mod_rewrite. Those are all questions probably better suited for ServerFault
Unless your site has a bunch of different domain names, and you only want mysite.com to do the rewriting, you don't need the RewriteCond. (Potential problem. Apache likes to dick around with the domain name unless you set UseCanonicalName off. If the name isn't what it's expecting, the rewrite won't happen.)
In RewriteCond (and RewriteRule) patterns, . matches any character. Add a backslash before them. (Minor bug. Shouldn't cause rewrites to fail, but they would match stuff like "mysite-com" as well.)
mod_rewrite is actually a URL-to-filename filter. Though it is often used to rewrite URLs to other URLs, sometimes it will misbehave if what you're rewriting to is a URL and it can't tell. (Especially if what it's rewriting to would be an alias, or would otherwise not translate directly to a real filename.) If you add a [PT] flag onto your rule, though, it will consider the rewritten thing a URL and pass it along to the other filters (including the ones that turn URLs into filenames).
Do you really need "/doc_root"? The document root should already be set up in Apache using the DocumentRoot directive, and shouldn't need to be part of the URL unless you have multiple apps on the same domain (in which case it's the app root; the document root doesn't change).
UPDATE:
Another thing i just thought about: Rewrite rules work differently in .htaccess files. Apache likes to strip off the leading slash. So you will probably want to get rid of the first slash in your patterns, or at least make it optional (^/?login instead of ^/login).
^/?(\w+) will match /doc_root/login.php, and cause a rewrite to /doc_root/doc_root.php. You should probably have a $ at the end of your pattern.
The web server is Apache. I want to rewrite URL so a user won't know the actual directory. For example:
The original URL:
www.mydomainname.com/en/piecework/piecework.php?piecework_id=11
Expected URL:
piecework.mydomainname.com/en/11
I added the following statements in .htaccess:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(?!www)([^.]+)\.mydomainname\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(w+)/(\d+)$ /$1/%1/%1.php?%1_id=$2 [L]
Of course I replaced mydomainname with my domain name.
.htaccess is placed in the site root, but when I access piecework.mydomainname.com/en/11, I got "Object not found".(Of course I replaced mydomainname with my domain name.)
I added the following statements in .htaccess:
RewriteRule ^/(.*)/en/piecework/(.*)piecework_id=([0-9]+)(.*) piecework.mydomainname.com/en/$3
Of course I replaced mydomainname with my domain name.
.htaccess is placed in the site root, but when I access piecework.mydomainname.com/en/11, I got "Object not found".(Of course I replaced mydomainname with my domain name.)
What's wrong?
Try using RewriteLog in your vhost or server-conf in order to check the rewriting process. Right now you just seem to guess what mod_rewrite does.
By using RewriteLogLevel you can modify the extend of the logging. For starters I'd recommend level 5.
PS: Don't forget to reload/restart the server after modifying the config.
Here's a quick overview of what's happening:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(?!www)([^.]+)\.mydomainname\.com$ [NC]
First, the question mark is supposed to be at the end.
$1 would (should) match anything that is not 'www' 0 or 1 times.
$2 matches anything that is not a character 1 or more times, which theoretically would match a blank space there but likely would never match anything.
Then it requires '.mydomainname.com' after those two groupings.
Your first two conditions are looking for two separate groupings.
I'm not sure exactly how you're trying to set up your structure, but here is how I would write it based on your original and expected URL's:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.mydomainname\.com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(\w+)\.mydomainname\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(\w+)/(\d+)$ /$1/%1/%1.php?%1_id=$2 [L]
Basically, your first condition is to make sure it's not the URL beginning with 'www' (it's easier to just make it a separate rule). The second condition makes it check any word that could possibly be in front of your domain name. Then your rewrite rule will redirect it appropriately.
Get rid of the last .htaccess line there in your question...
Someone please correct me if I typed something wrong. I don't remember if you have to have the '\' in front of '\w' and '\d' but I included them anyways.
You are doing it backwards. The idea is that you will give people the friendly address, and the re-write rule will point requests to this friendly, non-existent page to the real page without them seeing it. So right now you have it only handling what to do when they go to the ugly URL, but you are putting in the friendly URL. since no rule exists for when people put the friendly URL directly, apache looks for it and says "Object not Found"
So add a line:
RewriteRule piecework.mydomainname.com/en/(*.) ^/$3/en/piecework/$3?piecework_id=([0-9]+)(.*)
Sorry, that's quite right, but the basic idea is, if they put in the URL you like, Apache is ready to redirect to the real page without the browser seeing it.
Update
I'm way to sleepy to do regex correctly, so I had just tried my best to move your example around, sorry. I would try something more simple first just to get the basic concept down first. Try this:
RewriteRule www.mydomainname.com/en/piecework/piecework\.php\?piecework_id\=11 piecework.mydomainname.com/en/11
At the very least, it will be easier to see what isn't working if you get errors.