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I want a rather simple feature, I want my website to work when someone puts a www. before my domain name. My preference is to redirect all http://www. requests to http:// without anything complicated.

I have tried two methods to this and neither works desirably. The first option was to simply add this following rewrite engine command in the site's .htaccess (which, for the record, I confirmed was working)

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

I tried numerous variations of this code, and none of them do a thing. Even after resetting my browser cache, accessing through Tor, if I enter my website with the www. prefix then it simply doesn't load and Firefox gives me a "server not found" error.

The second thing that I have tried is to remove all rewrite codes and simply add the DNS record A, with the host www that points to my IP address. After waiting a little bit, the website was now working! However, it was incredibly inconsistent, because if I were to access www.example.com then it would remove the www., but if I went to www.example.com/page.html then it wouldn't remove it (but it'd still work). Another weird issue is that if I typed www.example.com/folder/page, it'd send me to www.example.comfolder/page.

Does anyone have any advice on what should I do or what I could be doing wrong?

Patrick Mevzek
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garirry
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    Possible duplicate of [Generic htaccess redirect www to non-www](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/234723/generic-htaccess-redirect-www-to-non-www) – Bogdan Condurache Sep 06 '18 at 23:04
  • For simpler redirection need, have a look at `mod_alias` and its `Rewrite` directives, this is far simpler than `mod_rewrite` and if possible you should try to use the main Apache configuration files instead of `.htaccess`, especially for redirection needs. – Patrick Mevzek Sep 07 '18 at 00:06

2 Answers2

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This should work.

RewriteEngine On 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^example\.com 
RewriteRule (.*) http://example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
Tayo.dev
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  • Tried this but doesn't do anything either. Am I missing something completely? Because of the 10 or so different RewriteEngine codes I tried none of them do anything. – garirry Sep 07 '18 at 05:04
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(This is not necessarily an answer, but my reputation is not yet sufficient to post a comment.)

The previous comment looks like it should do the job, so something unexpected is going on with the rewrite.

You might try enabling rewrite logging at a low level to see what is going on with the rewrite rule. Increase logging level by one level if the issue is not revealed. Note that logging mod_rewrite actions can produce really big logs, so it is prudent to try this on a testbed or a relatively idle host.

# Enable mod_rewrite
RewriteEngine On

# RewriteLogLevel: Controls verbosity of mod_rewrite log
#                  0=off, 9=max
RewriteLogLevel 2

As a side note and imo, I would do this in the config file and not in an .htaccess file because this rule should be applied site-wide on this host/vhost. This also makes it impossible for Apache to avoid executing the rewrite by ignoring the .htaccess file.