Question

I’m attempting to fix some annoyances with my current shared host configuration, but I’m having a few issues getting everything set up as I want it.

Currently, I have the following folder structure:

/
/.htaccess
  /example
  /example1
  /example2
  /example3

On the shared host, the primary domain is automatically set up to point to the root directory. In an effort to point the primary domain to a subdomain, I added the following to my root file’s .htaccess:

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

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?example\.com$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/example/
#RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
#RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /example/$1
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www.)?example.com$
RewriteRule ^(/)?$ example/ [L]

This properly rewrites the URL so that going to example.com displays the content from the /example/ subdirectory. The problem is that subdirectories of the root are not being rewritten in the same way, which is not the functionality that I was hoping to achieve. Example:

http://www.example.com/            = /example
http://www.example.com/example/    = /example
http://www.example.com/example1/   = /example1
http://www.example.com/example2/   = /example2
http://www.example.com/example3/   = /example3

What I want to happen is the following:

http://www.example.com/            = /example
http://www.example.com/example/    = /example/example
http://www.example.com/example1/   = /example/example1
http://www.example.com/example2/   = /example/example2
http://www.example.com/example3/   = /example/example3

My understanding of what should happen is as follows:

1. Request for http://www.example.com received.
2. First condition fails to match, HTTP_HOST does not match ^example.com$
3. Second condition: matches ^www.example.com
4. Third condition: no REQUEST_URI, so it matches not ^/example/
5. Fourth and fifth: I’ve tried with and without these, but it didn’t seem to change the result. My understanding is that if those lines are uncommented, I would see the unwanted before I’m having right now (if the filename and directory exist, the rewrite would not take place).
6. Rewrite the request to example.com/example/
7. Sixth condition: match the URL to a specific domain.
8. Always rewrite to use the /example/ subdirectory for this URL.

This does appear to work, but if I try to go to http://www.example.com/example2/, I get the problems. Since the REQUEST_URI doesn’t match /example/, my thought was that it should be rewriting to /example/example2, but that obviously doesn’t happen.

I don’t have access to the Apache configuration or the ability to set up VirtualHosts, so I’m hoping there’s some way that I can do this with .htaccess rules. Any insight into how I’m over-complicating this simple task would be extremely helpful.

Answer 1

As far as I could tell, the .htaccess file in my root was being ignored if a directory in the root matched the request that was coming in (that is, if example1 existed in the root directory, putting a RewriteCond to rewrite /example1 to an error page was never triggered).

My solution to this ended up being a bit less elegant than I had hoped, but it seems to be working. Hopefully it can help anyone else who stumbles onto this issue.

Inside of the example1, example2, and example3 directories, I modified the .htaccess file to include the following (changing example1 based on the directory):

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)example\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /example/example1/$1 [L]

This forces the main domain to serve the content that is within the sub-directory I had created for it, even if there is a matching directory in the root.