Redirect 301 www.www.example.com

Question

I'm using LAMP server, and I need to redirect requests like:

www.www.example.com to www.example.com and other variations like (wwww.example.com, etc)

I know I can do it in .htaccess, but I don't know the regular expression that I should use to represent all these possibilities.

Or there is any diferent approach, comming from the vhosts?

Answer 1

I like:

# force www IN URL
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.example\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
# END force www IN URL

Basically anything that's not www.example.com will get redirect 301'd.

Answer 2

See this article for implementing "wildcard subdomains." You're going to need to implement both an .htaccess and modifying the Vhosts.

http://www.easymodrewrite.com/example-subdomains

If you're interested in only limiting it to "www.www," "wwww.," and the other examples above, you can easily do so with some server-side coding (which makes it more flexible than implementing more .htaccess code). Just detect what the subdomain is, and redirect where you want.

Answer 3

Using name based virtual hosts in Apache you can do this:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName example.com
    ServerAlias wwww.example.com www.www.example.com [space seperated list]

    Redirect / http://www.example.com/
</VirtualHost>

Redirect can take a parameter to specify the type of redirect.