Remove www using .htaccess

caek00
(@caek00)

19 years, 3 months ago

I’d like to canonicalize my URLs by removing the leading “www”. I’ve managed to do this site-wide using a .htaccess in the root web directory (/home/me/example.com/). This reads:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.example.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.com/$1 [R=301]

It’s working everywhere except in the directory containing my WordPress installation (/home/me/example.com/blog/), presumably because WordPress has already created a .htaccess in that folder, which reads:

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

So I tried combining my .htaccess and WordPress’s, and came up with:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /blog/
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.example.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.com/blog/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /blog/index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

This works for almost everything:

http://www.example.com/blog/ > http://example.com/blog/
http://www.example.com/blog/archives/69 > http://example.com/blog/archives/69

and URLs without the leading “www” are untouched. Great! Except, one slight problem:

http://www.example.com/blog > http://example.com/blog//home/me/example.com/blog

(note absence of trailing slash on pre-rewritten URL.) So, I feel like I’m nearly there, but I’ve been futzing around with this file for hours and have been unable to figure this out. Does anyone have any ideas?

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

vkaryl
(@vkaryl)

19 years, 3 months ago

I’ve had the best luck with root folder wp installs putting the not-wp stuff (like the no-www rewrites) below the wp lines, in a separate <if module> section. Even then it seems to not always work, and I’ve finally resorted to having my host provider change all my domains to no-www ServerName parameter. This is done through the apache configuration on their end.
cheese500
(@cduke250)

19 years, 3 months ago
Hey caek00 this should work for ya!
```
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.example\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/?blog.* [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /blog/index.php [L]
```
From Ultimate Apache htaccess Article
icezorg
(@icezorg)

19 years, 1 month ago
My wordpress is installed on the root directory. So i tried writing the script like this:
```
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.yourdomain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://txtbuff.com/$1 [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/?.* [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
```
But the search function is not working well. How do I fix this?
pezastic
(@pezastic)

19 years, 1 month ago
I had my site set up like that with this in my .htaccess:
```
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(.+) [NC]
RewriteRule ^.*$ http://%1%{REQUEST_URI} [QSA,R=301,L]
```
However, it caused me problems later with a few plugins. One of the plugins was podPress. I can’t remember the other ones that had problems.

Anyway, I then tried two different plugins that also got rid of the WWW, but they also had problems with the aforementioned ones. Consequently, I gave up on the whole notion, because I needed to use those plugins.

I just wanted to make you aware that there could be problems later on down the line with plugins not working, if you do this.
beniro
(@beniro)

18 years, 10 months ago
Hello. I seem to have a solution built from the responses above that is working without issue on my site. I hope this helps someone.
```
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
</IfModule>

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