Canonical redirect using htaccess

katos

How to redirect www or non-www using htaccess

Hi Flarumites!
After seeing a request for a guide on how to redirect from non-www to www on Discord, I thought I'd write up a short guide for those who are struggling. Please note that this is for Apache web servers and leverages htaccess. There are other methods of achieving this result, and I am not saying that one is necessarily better than the other.

Why should I redirect

Having a canonical address can be better for SEO rather than having your site on both www and non-www versions, particularly if one version is different to the other (broken images, links, etc).

In the below examples, you should replace yourdomain.com with your actual domain name.

Redirecting from www to non-www

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

Redirecting from non-www to www

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

The above codes should go at the very top of your htaccess file.

Walys

katos

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

rob006

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

Hello,
I view a small differences in this code to non-www in domain

in rob006 code I view that in the second line have a exclamation symbol ! and domain without www. and then have a \ and $
And in the third line have a example.com$1 without / in the midle

The two options working well to non-www?
Where is the different with this add the symbol ! or delete / ?

Thanks!

rob006

More flexible rules (no hardcoded domain, handle https):

RewriteEngine On

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

RewriteCond %{HTTPS} on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(.*)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%1/$1 [R=301,L]

But I would rather use this extension instead - easier to configure and handles more cases.

katos

rob006 This was written as a substitute for the extension as requested on Discord, as I say there are a number of ways to do this 🙂

rob006

If hardcoding domain is not a problem (it is a problem if you keep .htaccess under version control and have different environments with different domains for testing), then I prefer this:

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

It handles all subdomains normalization (not only www.example.com but also wwww.example.com or test.example.com).

The big advantage of extension is that it merges these two features - it handles all subdomains and does not force you to hardcode domain anywhere (except config file, which you need anyway).

clarkwinkelmann

Walys the first rule redirects the www subdomain to apex.

The second rule redirects anything that isn't the apex to the apex.

The first rule wouldn't prevent you accessing the server via its IP address for example.

If the website is only accessible through the www and apex domains, the two are functionally identical.

Also in case you change domain in the future, the first rule would just no longer have any effect while the second rule might need to be modified in advance to avoid any infinite redirection loop.