Question

It’s been a long time since I’ve used Apache (a very long time) and even then I didn’t really do much URL rewriting or anything like that, just simple hosting. But now I’m trying to piece together a simple redirect for a small business that’s re-branded to a new domain.

The way it’s set up is that the host for the old domain has a web control panel based redirect to a specific URL, which is a “looking for the old us?” page on the new domain. All requests are redirected, but they carry with them the entire request path which results in a 404 on the new site.

I’ve been looking through some Apache documentation and some examples I can find online, but I’m not quite there yet. Where I’ve left off so far is with something like this:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} .*looking-for-blah.* [NC]
RewriteRule ^ http://newsite.com/looking-for-blah [L,R=301]

The idea is that any request coming in for any path which contains looking-for-blah, regardless of what’s before or after it, should go to the explicit http://newsite.com/looking-for-blah. So when the old host redirects somebody to:

http://newsite.com/looking-for-blah/foo/baz

They get redirected by the new site to:

http://newsite.com/looking-for-blah

However, it doesn’t seem to be catching the incoming requests and redirecting them. Am I missing some fundamental concept in the RewriteCond? Maybe there’s a better way to do this that I haven’t even considered?

Edit: Here’s the current state of the .htaccess as a whole:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress
# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

# BEGIN custom redirect
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule looking-for-icamp http://empow.me/looking-for-icamp [L,R=301]
</IfModule>
# END icamp redirect

But doing a simple wget on http://empow.me/looking-for-icamp/foo results in a 404 instead of the desired 301.

Answer 1

The WordPress default catch-all routing is matching your rule before it can be reached, so your rule will need to be placed above any WordPress rewrites. I also added a RewriteCond to be more explicit about the circular rewrite avoidance than your .+ trick, which seems a little hacky to me and would be hard to understand on later readings.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

# BEGIN custom redirect

# This must take place before the WordPress redirect to index.php
# Added condition to avoid circular rewrite
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/looking-for-icamp$ 
RewriteRule looking-for-icamp http://empow.me/looking-for-icamp [L,R=301]
# END icamp redirect

# Note - you had two identical WP blocks. I've removed one.

# BEGIN WordPress
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

# This rule was the one blocking your custom rule earlier....
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

# END WordPress
</IfModule>