Force www. in URL name through .htaccess

Question

I know that there are a bunch of answers for this question already on this forum and over the internet. But everything I tried is not working for me and I have no clue why. So that's why I'm asking this question.

I'm running a website with ExpressionEngine CMS. To remove index.php from the URL there is a small .htaccess rule which mentioned below and working fine.

RewriteCond $1 !\.(gif|jpe?g|png)$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [L]

Everything running fine with this code in the htaccess file. But now I want to force www. in the URL because some AJAX scripts are not working when the URL is without www.. So I found some threads on this forum:

• .htaccess - how to force "www." in a generic way?
• https://expressionengine.stackexchange.com/questions/9853/site-doesnt-work-with-www-at-the-start-of-the-address/9864#9864
• https in htaccess and order of rules (using Expression Engine)

The last has the most clear solution in my opinion so I added this to my .htaccess file.

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

My .htaccess file now looks like this:

RewriteEngine on

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

# remove index.php
RewriteCond $1 !\.(gif|jpe?g|png)$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [L]

This however give's me a ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS error.

I tried all other kind of methods but I keep getting this error and I don't know why. Everything I try to force www. through htaccess doesn't work or gives me this error.

What is going on? Is it possible that DNS settings have to do something with this?

Answer 1

You need to change it on Plesk control panel, you access the domain in question and change the non-www to www or set it to none.

The option you look for is located at subscription > Web Hosting Settings > Preferred Domain.

In case you set it to none then you can use the .htaccess rule.