I had a working .htaccess for my website, but I decided to add domain name canonicalization - e.g. prepend 'www' if it is omitted.
Here's what I'm using now:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.domain\.com$
RewriteRule ^.*$ http://www.domain.com/$0 [L,R=301]
RewriteRule ^$ http://www.domain.com/blog/ [L,R=301]
// etc
The first condition/rule are the ones I added. The second rule redirects empty filepath to "blog/". Now, the problem is, if I type in a path like "domain.com/page", for some reason it redirects me to the blog. If I change the first rule to http://www.domain.com/test?url=$0, it correctly redirects me to www.domain.com/test?url=page. What am I doing wrong, and is there a way to possibly see some sort of logs/debug output? (I'm using shared hosting so I don't have access to low level logs)
Update: its working fine now; it seems the redirects were cached somewhere, even though clearing all browser data didn't help. Could it be possible that the redirects got cached on proxy level, and how to deal with it, since it makes editing/debugging .htaccess nearly impossible?
Related
Ok, so I know this is a question that has been asked many times, however, I have not been able to find an answer to my particular case, so please do not shoot me down.
I have a website: http://gmcomputers.co.za.
I am redirecting this URL, using .htaccess file, to a subfolder to load the content:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/$
RewriteRule (.*) /gmcomputers/ [L,DPI,R=301]
Which works perefectly, except when I go to http://gmcomputers.co.za I get http://gmcomputers.co.za/gmcomputers/.
So my question is, how do I modify the above code to remove the /gmcomputers/ from being appended?
Please note I copied the code above from a website as I am not at all experienced in redirect, etc and am still learning. Also, the reason I am using .htaccess to redirect is due to there being other websites in the root directory and I therefore cannot edit any config files for Apache.
Thanking you.
You contradict yourself in your question. On the one hand you write that you want to redirect and that this "works perfectly", but then you write that you do not want that result.
My guess is that you actually do not want to redirect at all, but that instead you want to internally rewrite your requests to point to that server side folder. While the URL visible in the browser's URL bar does not show that folder. Is that what you are trying to ask?
If so take a look at this example:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/gmcomputers
RewriteRule ^ /gmcomputers%{REQUEST_URI} [END]
You might want to add an actual redirection to direct clients actually using the folder name in their requests:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/?gmcomputers/(.*)$ /$1 [R=301,END]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/gmcomputers
RewriteRule ^ /gmcomputers%{REQUEST_URI} [END]
Best is to implement such rules in the central http server's host configuration. If you do not have access to that you can instead use a distributed configuration file (typically called ".htaccess") located in the DOCUMENT_ROOT folder configured for the http host, if you enabled the consideration of such files in your host configuration . Though that comes with a number of disadvantages. Above implementation works likewise for both approaches.
what I try to do is to simulate directories with the help of a htaccess file.
I have a website with a file like this:
http://www.domain.com/filename.php?t=yeah-a-title-2014
Now, I would like to rewrite the URL above to the following:
http://www.domain.com/directory1/yeah-a-title-2014/
If a visitor enters one of the two URLs, he should see the second one in his address bar but the content of the filename.php?t=yeah-a-title-2014 should be displayed.
I have no idea how to realize this.
Any ideas?
This is better known as SEO-urls (search engine optimized), SEF-urls (search engine friendly), fancy urls and a couple more of those terms. The basic problem with these kind of constructions, is that they cause an infinite loop if not implemented correctly, and therefore usually the THE_REQUEST trick is used, because %{THE_REQUEST} is always equal to the request, even if the url is rewritten, which in turn prevents the external redirect from matching if the internal rewrite matches.
#External redirect
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^(GET|POST)\ /filename\.php\?t=(.*)\ HTTP
RewriteRule ^ /directory1/%2/ [R,L]
#Change [R,L] to [R=301,L] after ALL rules do what you want them to do, and before your site goes live
#Internal rewrite
RewriteRule ^directory1/([^/]+)/?$ /filename.php?t=$1 [L]
On shared web-hosting my software supports multiple domains (all domains point to the same public_html root directory).
What I want to do is keep redirects (and any RedirectMatch) in their own host specific/dedicated .htaccess file.
Visually the directory structure looks like this...
/public_html/ (all domains are pointed internally to this directory)
/public_html/.htaccess
/public_html/www.example1.com/
/public_html/www.example2.com/
/public_html/www.example3.com/
There are two approaches I'm considering though would appreciate input from others:
The first would be to keep domain specific redirects out of the main .htaccess file as defined above. So I'd like to have redirects handled by the .htaccess files as defined by below if possible...
/public_html/www.example1.com/.htaccess
/public_html/www.example2.com/.htaccess
/public_html/www.example3.com/.htaccess
...if this is not feasible I'll settle for a rewrite to a PHP file to hand off redirects to PHP instead. I imagine this isn't as performance oriented though on the other hand it would give me the opportunity to log redirects and see how long it takes them to level off.
Some clarifications:
I'm using shared web hosting so anything Apache related needs to be done through .htaccess files only.
There are no redirects/matches in the master .htaccess file nor will there ever be since two domains may eventually attempt to use the same redirect.
Since you are on shared host, You cannot afford to have any solutions concerning conf files (which BTW are better). So wont bother to list them. Best way to do the above is like this:
The code was written keeping in mind that none of the domains share any kind of file/data on the server. Every file/data pertaining to a domain is kept under a folder having the name equal to its domainname.
The code below is tested(both static and non static):
RewritEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{ENV:REDIRECT_STATUS} 200
RewriteRule ^ - [L]
And add either of the following to the above:
for doing it statically:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(example1|example2|example3)(\.com)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /www.%1%2/$1 [L]
for doing it statically: and also if you want to access the site without www
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?(example1|example2|example3)(\.com)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /%1%2%3/$1 [L]
for Non-statically do it: this is a better sol
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [L]
All the above will do is redirect URI to their specific domain's folder. All other domain specific rewrites can be handled in the respective folders.
If you have URIs without the www, i.e. example1.com change ^www\.(example1|example2|example3)(\.com)$ to ^(www\.)?(example1|example2|example3)(\.com)$
For a perfect working and Error404-Free log file, I have to redirect all previous (now wrong) home page urls to the new homepage. For that I have a partially working rewrite:
RewriteRule ^home$ /en/aster [R=301]
// Works for site.com/home but NOT for site.com/en/home or site.com/xx/home etc.
Q1. How to make an optional part ?????/ sothat site.com/anything/home permanently redirects to site.com/anything/home making sure that the root is not another folder but the actual real sites root followed by the two language chars then /home?
Q2. for consistency and SEO purposes, Do I need a [R=301] or a [R=301,L] ?
Your ideas and help is highly appreciated.
Not sure if I completely understand what you want the site.com/anything/home to redirect to, but this is how I understood:
RewriteRule (.*)/home $1/en/aster [R=301,L] Will match all requests ending in "/home". The (.*) will keep the urls in the same path. Therefore site.com/anything/home redirects to site.com/anything/en/aster
As far as SEO, there is no difference between [R=301,L] and [R=301]. The L informs mod_rewrite to not process any further rules, which in this case is what you would want, since you are redirecting to a new page.
Hope this helps.
my .htaccess in the root folder includes the following lines :
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.htm$ http://example.com/?city=$1 [NC]
when I open the address http://example.com/bla.htm, my browser doesn't hide the GET values specified in the .htaccess, it redirects me to ?city=bla. eventhough I'm not using the [R] switch. This has always worked for me before (as I remember, haven't dealt with htaccess in a while). What's wrong here ?
When you redirect to an entire URL, it doesn't do URL rewriting (you can't exactly rewrite URLs on someone else's website).
Assuming both URLs are on the same server, you need to do something like
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.htm$ index.php?city=$1 [NC]
Also, I'd recommend getting into the habit of using the [L] switch whenever you can - it helps avoid bugs when you have a lot of URLs to rewrite.