How to combine Apache redirects? - apache

Question

I've got an Apache config that features multiple rewrite rules and redirects in order to get the cutest URLs, prevent duplicates for SEO, etc. Here's a snippet as an example (it features a lot more):
# Redirecting non-www to www
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
# Removing index.php
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} index\.php$ [NC]
RewriteRule .* / [R=301,L]
# A big bunch of these
Redirect permanent /old-article.html http://www.example.com/new-article.html
Redirect permanent /another-old-article.html http://www.example.com/new-article2.html
This works well, but it happens to generate a lot of redirects. A common case looks like this:
http://example.com/index.php, 301 redirect to http://www.example.com/index.php
http://www.example.com/index.php, 301 redirect to http://www.example.com
It sometimes reaches 4-5 redirects.
Now, I want all these rules to be chained and generate only one 301 redirect, like this:
http://example.com/index.php, 301 redirect to http://www.example.com
I know I can spend an afternoon thinking and sorting the rules to a better match, and also that I can create combined rules. But that would complicate an already long file. I want a flag, operand or whatever that will execute all the rules as if they where internal and only issue the redirect once it has crawled every rule. Is this even possible?

Answer 1

It seems as if simply re-ordering this would get you what you want:
# A big bunch of these
Redirect permanent /old-article.html http://www.example.com/new-article.html
Redirect permanent /another-old-article.html http://www.example.com/new-article2.html
# Removing index.php
RewriteRule ^/index.php http://www.example.com/ [R=301,L]
# Redirecting non-www to www
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
A direct request for an old article at the example.com domain:
http://example.com/old-article.html
Will result in a single redirect to:
http://www.example.com/new-article.html
A request for either http://example.com/index.php or http://www.example.com/index.php will result in a single redirect to:
http://www.example.com/
A request that doesn't match anything else will result in a single redirect from:
http://example.com/foo
To:
http://www.example.com/foo
This seems to cover all the bases. Have I missed anything?

Answer 2

Remove the [L] flag from your RewriteRules, and they will be combined automatically.