Question

Assume / is the document root of my domain example.com.

/.htaccess

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

/dir/.htaccess

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /dir/index.php [L]
</IfModule>

I know how to redirect example.com/dir to www.example.com/dir, because /.htaccess does the very job.

However, the trick here is that I have to keep /dir/.htaccess to serve up virtual directories (such as /dir/state/AK/35827/ which aren’t actual directories) if you know what I mean.

Problem is, if I keep /dir/.htaccess, a request of:

http://example.com/dir/state/AK/35827/

DOES NOT redirect to:

http://www.example.com/dir/state/AK/35827/

as would:

http://example.com/

redirect to:

http://www.example.com/

Not sure if I made it clear.

Basically, how to make http://example.com/dir/state/AK/35827/ correctly redirect to http://www.example.com/dir/state/AK/35827/ AND I can serve virtual URLs?

Answer 1

If you do have access to your apache VirtualHosts configuration then you need:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName example.com
    Redirect permanent / http://www.example.com/
</VirtualHost>

This will succesfully redirect http://example.com/ to http://www.example.com/ and http://example.com/dir/state/AK/35827/ to http://www.example.com/dir/state/AK/35827/