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Asked: 2026-05-29T06:07:14+00:00

I just redeveloped an existing site from the ground up. The old site used

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I just redeveloped an existing site from the ground up. The old site used pure HTML while the new site will draw content from a database. Now I need to redirect the old pages to the new URL structure, but I’m a bit confused about how to write the .htaccess rules for a file-to-file redirect.

In all the examples I’ve found, the first part of the rule looks like an absolute directory path from the root, but they only contain the part of the URL that immediately follows the domain name.

For instance, I want to redirect

https://garrettcounty.us/archives/12262011news.html

to

https://garrettcounty.us/news/20111226/house-fire-on-christmas-day

From the examples I’ve seen (both on StackOverflow and abroad), I guess the rule would be

redirect 301 /archives/12262011news.html https://garrettcounty.us/news/20111226/house-fire-on-christmas-day

but the actual path to the original file on the server is

/home/username/public_html/archives/12262011news.html

Should I use the directory path or the path from the domain?

I would love to be able to use a rewrite rule. Unfortunately, the original developer didn’t use a consistent file naming scheme so I’m faced with things like

12262011news.html
Jan-19-2012-Headlines.html
State-Of-The-Union-25jan2012.html

In the new model, I’m directing everything through index.php with

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
 RewriteEngine On
 RewriteBase /
 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
 RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?q=$1 [L,QSA]
</IfModule>

so if anyone knows of an easier way to map all the old pages to the new URLs, I’d love to hear it. As it stands, it looks like I have to redirect 70+ pages one-by-one.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Well you old URL doesn’t have news title so obviously mod_rewrite cannot create it. However to redirect

    https://garrettcounty.us/archives/12262011news.html

    to

    https://garrettcounty.us/news/20111226/

    you can use code like this in your .htaccess:

    Options +FollowSymLinks -MultiViews
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{HTTPS} =on
RewriteRule ^archives/(\d+)([^.]*)\.html$ https://garrettcounty.us/$2/$1/ [R=301,L,NC]

    Path used in Redirect directives: For mod_alias or mod_rewrite you must use path relative to DOCUMENT_ROOT not the full path on filesystem.

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