Question

I have managed to put this condition and rule below together to redirect a page to include index.shtml at the end of it but I dont understand what this part of the Rewrite means – the ^$ part. I believe ^ means start and $ is end but in this context I dont understand its meaning in “English” and how it works:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.example1\.test\.com [NC]  
RewriteRule ^$ http://www.example1.test.com/index.shtml [R,L]

Thanks.

Answer 1

^ is the start of the string, $ is the end. If there’s nothing in between, as in the case of ^$, that means an empty string. Since the path leading up to the current directory is ignored, the part of the URL that matches is after the http://www.example1.test.com/. Matching an “empty string” after that means matching the URL itself, as in: with no file or anything else specified. So, this redirects the root URL to index.shtml