Question

This is the 1st time I am using stackoverflow, I usually find answers to my questions about development thanks to Google, or with the help of some friends. Not this time !

I am in trouble with a .htaccess file where I want to define a double rule.
Initally I had this code for URL rewriting :

    RewriteEngine on
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
    RewriteRule ^(.*) /index.php?query=$1&%{QUERY_STRING} [L]

It is working like a charm, but I saw that many of the pages of the website indexed by Google where duplicated on a subdomain of my website, so I decided to add this code in the .htaccess :

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !mydomain.com/$
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.mydomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Please notice that I have added this code, just after the RewriteEngine on.
The result is almost what I expect, the 301 redirection from subdomain such as mail.domain.com/mypage.html is working and leads to http://www.domain.com/mypage.html but the second rule for URL rewriting pages is like cancelled ! So all pages which use the second rule have a 404 error.

I have tested many different things but couldn’t figure out how to fix that ?
Anyone has a tip to help me success ?

Thanks in advance guys !

Answer 1

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !mydomain.com/$

This condition always matches, since you are asking for a hostname that does not end in mydomain.com/; %{HTTP_HOST} will never end in a slash, since it only contains the hostname with no path. Since the condition always matches, its RewriteRule is always in effect, and it is marked as [L] (last rule). I have no idea why it does not result in an redirection loop, probably some short-circuit logic in mod_rewrite that stops the rewriting when the URL hasn’t been changed.

What you probably want is this:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !=www.mydomain.com
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.mydomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]