Posts Tagged ‘RewriteRule’

mod_rewrite redirect rule 80 to 443 on Apache webserver

Wednesday, April 2nd, 2014

A classic sysadmin scenario is to configure new Apache webserver with requirement to have an SSL ceriticate installed and working on port 443 and all requests coming on port 80 to be redirected to https://.
On Apache this is done with simple mod_rewrite rule:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI}

Before applying the rule don't forget to have Apache mod_rewrite enabled usually it is not enabled on default most Linux distributions by default.
On shared hostings if you don't have access to directly modify Apache configuration but have .htaccess enabled you can add above rules also to .htaccess

Add this to respective VirtualHost configuration and restart Apache and that's it. If after configuring it for some reason it is not working debug mod_rewrite issues by enabling mod_rewrite's rewrite.log

Other useful Apache mod_rewrite redirect rule is redirect a single landing page from HTTP to HTTP

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^apache-redirect-http-to-https.html$ https://www.site-url.com/apache-redirect-http-to-https.html [R=301,L]

!Note! that in case where performance is a key requirement for a website it might be better to use the standard way to redirect HTTP to HTTPS protocol in Apache through:

ServerName www.site-url.com Redirect / https://www.site-url.com/

To learn more on mod_rewrite redirecting  check out this official documentation on Apache's official site.

How to fix bug with WordPress domain extra trailing slash (Double wordpress trailing slash)

Monday, July 9th, 2012

How to fix bug with wordpress extra slash, domain double slash issue pic

2 of the wordpress installations, I take care for had been reported an annoying bug today by some colleagues.
The bug consisted in double trailing slash at the end of the domain url e.g.;

http://our-company-domainname.com//

As a result in the urls everywhere there was the double trailing slash appearing i.e.::

http://our-company-domainname.com//countact-us/
http://our-company-domainname.com//languages/

etc.

The bug was reported to happen in the multiolingual version of the wordpress based sites, as the Qtranslate plugin is used on this installations to achieve multiple languages it seemed at first logical that the double slash domain and url wordpress issues are caused for some reason by qTranslate.

Therefore, I initially looked for the cause of the problem, within the wordpress admin settings for qTranslate plugin. After not finding any clue pointing the bug to be related to qTranslate, I've then checked the settings for each individual wordpress Page and Post (There in posts usually one can manually set the exact url pointing to each post and page).
The double slash appeared also in each Post and Page and it wasn't possible to edit the complete URL address to remove the double trailin slashes. My next assumption was the cause for the double slash appearing on each site link is because of something wrong with the sites .htaccess, therefore I checked in the wp main sites directory .htaccess
Strangely .htacces seemed OKAY and there was any rule that somehow might lead to double slashes in URL. WP-sites .htaccess looked like so:
 

server:/home/wp-site1/www# cat .htaccess
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

# Rewrite rules for new content and scripts folder
RewriteRule ^jscripts/(.*)$ wp-includes/js/$1
RewriteRule ^gallery/(.*)$ wp-content/uploads/$1
RewriteRule ^modules/(.*)$ wp-content/plugins/$1
RewriteRule ^gui/(.*)/(.*)$ wp-content/themes/$1/$2 [L]

# Disable direct acceees to wp files if referer is not valid
#RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} .wp-*
#RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} .wp-*
#RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !.*media-upload.php.*
#RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !.*cadia.*
#RewriteRule . /error404 [L]

# Standard WordPress rewrite
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

Onwards, I thought a possible way to fix bug by adding mod_rewrite rules in .htaccess which would do a redirect all requests to http://www.our-company-domainname.com//contact-us/ to http://www.our-company-domainname.com//contact-us/ etc. like so:

RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ /$1

This for unknown reasons to me didn't worked either, finally thanks God I remembered to check the variables in wp-config.php (some month ago or so I added there some variables in order to improve the wordpress websites opening times).

I've figured out I did a mistake in one of the variables by adding an ending slash to the URL. The variable added was:

define('WP_HOME','http://our-company-domainname.com/');

whether instead it should be without the ending trailing slash like so:

define('WP_HOME','http://our-company-domainname.com');

By removing the ending trailing slash:

define('WP_HOME','http://our-company-domainname.com/');

to:

define('WP_HOME','http://our-company-domainname.com');
fixed the issue.
Cheers 😉

How to add Apache 301 redirect to VirtualHost in Apache

Sunday, September 25th, 2011

I’ve had two domain names which were pointing to the same website content.
As one can read in any SEO guide around this is a really bad practice as search engines things automatically there is a duplicate site content and this has automatically a negative effect on the site pagerank.
To deal with situation where multiple domains are pointing to the same websites its suggested by many SEO specialists that a 301 redirect is created from all the domain websites to a single website domain which will open the actual website.

Making the 301 direct domain from the sample domain my-redirect-domain.com to www.mydomain.com can be done with a virtualhost dfefinition in either httpd.conf or with the respective file containing the domain virtualhost definitions:
Here is the exact VirtualHost code I use to make a 301 redirect.

<VirtualHost *>  ServerAdmin support@mydomain.com  ServerName my-redirected-domain.com
ServerAlias my-redirected-domain.com www.my-redirected-domain.com
RewriteEngine on RewriteRule ^/(.*) http://www.mydomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]
</VirtualHost>

After placing the VirtualHost redirect, an apache redirect is required.
Further on when a Gooogle or Yahoo Bot visits the website and does any request to my-redirect-domain.com or www.my-redirect-domain.com , they will be redirected with a 301 reuturned code to www.mydomain.com

This kind of redirect however can have a negative impact on the Apache CPU use (performance), especially if the my-redirect-domain.com is high traffic domain. This is because the redirect is done with mod_rewrite.

Therefore it might be better on high traffic domains to create the mod_rewrite redirect by using a vhost like:

<VirtualHost *>
ServerAdmin support@mydomain.com
ServerName my-redirected-domain.com
Redirect 301 / http://www.mydomain.com/
</VirtualHost>

The downside of using the Apache 301 redirect capabilities like in the above example is that any passed domain urls like let’s say http://www.my-redirected-domain.com/support/ would not be 301 redirected to http://www.mydomain.com/support/ but instead the redirect will be done straight to http://www.mydomain.com/