Rewrite example.com to www.example.com

Question

I want to rewrite urls to the www subdomain if the user omits it, i.e. example.com/something.html to www.example.com/something.html

The config below doesn't work, user remains on example.com. There's probably missing something very simple...

<VirtualHost *:80>

    DocumentRoot /data/domains/example.com/www/public
    ServerName www.example.com
    ServerAlias example.com
#        ErrorDocument 404 /index.pl page_not_found
#          CustomLog /logs/apache/example.com/access_log combined
#        RedirectMatch 301 ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteEngine on 
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^!example.com$ [NC]
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
</IfModule>

Answer 1

My own solution to this is to use two virtual hosts, one with the non-www that redirects to the other one with the www as follows:

<VirtualHost *:80>
     ServerName example.com
     Redirect permanent / http://www.example.com/
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *:80>
     DocumentRoot /data/domains/example.com/www/public
     ServerName www.example.com
</VirtualHost>

That way, I don't have to mess-up with the cryptic .htaccess rules as much as possible. KISS principle, remember ;)

Ismael Casimpan

Answer 2

I do thing in the different way ;) This is my working rules:

# redirect www.fclose.com/* to fclose.com/*
RewriteBase   /
RewriteCond   %{HTTP_HOST}             ^www\.fclose\.com$
RewriteRule   ^(.*)                    http://fclose.com/$1 [R=301,L]

You may try these rules:

RewriteBase   /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain\.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

I change the one above and get them.

Answer 3

Change your RewriteRule to:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain\.com

So the whole thing should look like:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteEngine on 
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain\.com
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
</IfModule>