Question

How do I go about redirecting all requests for domain.com/… to www.domain.com/… with a 301 in a django site?

Obviously this can’t be done in urls.py because you only get the path part of the URL in there.

I can’t use mod rewrite in .htaccess, because .htaccess files do nothing under Django (I think).

I’m guessing something in middleware or apache conf?

I’m running Django on a Linux server with Plesk, using mod WSGI

Answer 1

The WebFaction discussion someone pointed out is correct as far as the configuration, you just have to apply it yourself rather than through a control panel.

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

Put in .htaccess file, or in main Apache configuration in appropriate context. If inside of a VirtualHost in main Apache configuration, your would have ServerName be http://www.example.com and ServerAlias be example.com to ensure that virtual host handled both requests.

If you don’t have access to any Apache configuration, if need be, it can be done using a WSGI wrapper around the Django WSGI application entry point. Something like:

import django.core.handlers.wsgi
_application = django.core.handlers.wsgi.WSGIHandler()

def application(environ, start_response):
  if environ['HTTP_HOST'] != 'www.example.com':
    start_response('301 Redirect', [('Location', 'http://www.example.com/'),])
    return []
  return _application(environ, start_response)

Fixing this up to include the URL within the site and dealing with https is left as an exercise for the reader. 🙂