Question

If I put theese lines to .htaccess everything works well (when I’m going to http://www.example.ru I’m redirected to http://example.ru).

RewriteEngine On

# Installation directory
RewriteBase /

# Redirect all www to non-www
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.example.ru [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.ru/$1 [L,R]

But If I put exactly same lines to <VirtualHost> -> <Directory> section trying to go to http://www.example.ru redirects me to http://example.ru/www.

Anybody knows why?

UPD

New VirtualHost:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName example.ru
    ServerAlias www.example.ru
    ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
    DocumentRoot /home/example/www/example.ru/www

    RewriteEngine On

    <Directory /home/example/www/example.ru>
            Options FollowSymLinks
            AllowOverride All
            Order allow,deny
            Allow from all
    </Directory>

    ErrorLog /home/example/www/example.ru/log/error.log

    LogLevel warn

    SetEnvIf Remote_Addr 127.0.0.1 loopback

    CustomLog /home/example/www/example.ru/log/access.log combined env=!loopback

    # Redirect all www to non-www
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.example.ru [NC]
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.ru$1 [L,R]

</VirtualHost>

Answer 1

Spent some time I’ve figured out, that in VirtualHost section, pattern will match against the part of the URL after the hostname and port, and before the query string (in my case “/”).

In Directory section, pattern will match against the filesystem path.