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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-15T05:29:41+00:00

Using .htaccess I am successfully redirecting a specific set of subfolders ( blog ,

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Using .htaccess I am successfully redirecting a specific set of subfolders ( blog, dev, media, etc ) to subdomains.

Like so:

www.website.com/_subs/dev/foo gets directed to dev.website.com/foo

This has been achieved with the following fragments of code:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /

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

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} website.com
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/_subs/blog/(.*)$
RewriteRule .* http://blog.website.com/%1 [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} website.com
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/_subs/dev/(.*)$
RewriteRule .* http://dev.website.com/%1 [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} website.com
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/_subs/media/(.*)$
RewriteRule .* http://media.website.com/%1 [R=301,L]

The question is:

How do I prevent access to the /_subs folder if a request ISN’T made to one of my specific subfolders?

I would like any requests being made to www.website.com/_subs/foo to simply be redirected to www.website.com

I have tried using a 301 redirect along with various other attempts to no avail 🙁

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Your rules are a lot more complicated than they need to be and I think that’s making the solution harder to see.

    Here’s what I came up with:

    RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www.)?website.com$
RewriteRule ^_sub/(blog|dev|media)/?(.*)$ http://$1.website.com/$2 [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www.)?website.com$
RewriteRule ^_sub(/.*)$ - [F]

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

    The RewriteConds limit the first two rules so that they only run on website.com and www.website.com. Presumably you might have a url like http://blog.website.com/_sub/this-rocks in the future that you don’t want redirected.

    Including both domains in the first rewrite means you will have one less 301 redirect, which should make a request to http://website.com/_sub/blog redirect directly to http://blog.website.com much faster. The L makes sure that nothing that matches this rule will get marked as forbidden.

    The second rewrite returns 403 for anything starting with /_sub that is not matched by the first rule. The / is inside the group so that this will match /_sub, /_sub/, and /_sub/.*. If the / were outside you would not be able to 403 /_sub without a separate rule.

    The last rewrite is the same as your very first rule – there is no need to put the L, though, as it’s already the last rule to process.

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