301 Redirects

[mregister]

Hello All,

Does anyone know of a good tutorial on how to setup a 301 redirect with ubuntu/apache2 ? And let me say that I am not entirely sure that a 301 is what I need. What I am trying to accomplish is have example.com go to www.example.com. From what I have read I should create an .htaccess file with:

RewriteEngine on

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

but when i do this example.com comes up with an internal server error page. Should I create a virtual host example.com first then use .htaccess?

Thanks to all,

Mark

[Thirtysixway]

From the apache web site
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/misc/rewriteguide.html

RewriteEngine on

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

Not sure how to force a 301 but hope this sort of helps. It looks to only have some small changes to what you have currently, try it out.

[mregister]

No dice. This is not a heavly configured machine and www.example.com comes up fine but still can't get the example.com to www.example.com to work. Here is my .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine on

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

I still get the internal server error page when I try to load example.com.
I checked the server error log and noting about it. From all that I have read, the above .htaccess file should work. I am wondering if I should setup a virtual host and then just copy /etc/apache2/sites-available/default /etc/apache2/sites-available/example then enalbe the site? But it just seems the easiest and best way is to use .htaccess but it's just not working.

[volkswagner]

This 301 Redirect How-to helped me a lot. It explains various servers.

I think for Linux based you can use the .htaccess method.

[Thirtysixway]

This 301 Redirect How-to helped me a lot. It explains various servers.

I think for Linux based you can use the .htaccess method.

From the page:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

[mregister]

Ok thanks Thirtysixway this worked:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on

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

However, and I feel stupid, BUT I had to enable mod_rewrite.

Also, if you notice in the code above I have no trailing $1 after http://www.example.com/$1 in the rewrite rule, because, and I found this out, that tells apache to use the first virtual site that you have configured, but if you leave it off then it just goes to your default site.