[Sussex] htaccess & 301s

[Steve Dobson]

Hi Dominic

Dominic Humphries wrote:
> I've got an annoying problem with trying to set up a 301 redirect on a 
> website.
> 
> It's a SEO thing, they want to avoid having 'www' in their URL. So that 
> should be easy enough, you can set up a redirect to send all 
> 'www'-containing addresses to the non-www alternative.
> 
> Problem is, all the redirects seem to follow this format:
> 
> rewritecond %{http_host} ^www.domain.com [nc]
> rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]
> 
> And this site needs to have some pages secure, i.e. accessed via httpS - 
> and the above code always redirects to plain http.
> 
> Is there any way to set up a redirect so any attempt to access 
> www.domain.com gets sent to domain.com, but everything else gets left 
> alone? Or failing that, a way to stop it redirecting https requests?

I didn't use the htaccess files, but did it within the "VirtualHost" 
config.  My needs were much easier, I wanted to redirect any "http" 
access to the "https" stream, but I would think you can have many 
"RewriteRule"s to meet your needs.

     <VirtualHost www.example.com:80>
         ServerAdmin webmaster at example.com

         ServerName example.com
         DocumentRoot /var/www
         RewriteEngine   on
         RewriteRule     ^.*$    https://example.com
         CustomLog /var/log/apache2/access.log combined
         ServerSignature On
     </VirtualHost>

     <VirtualHost www.example.com:443>
         ServerAdmin webmaster at example.com

	# Config for the virtual host that serves the web pages
     </VirtualHost>