URL rewrites issues - .htaccess

We are having a problem with URL rewrites on an apache server using .htaccess.
Goal: to have the following URL stripped of its category & subcategory while leaving the generic redirect in place.
Test 1:
Redirect 301 /category/subcategory/product http://www.site.com/product
Redirect works perfectly. A single redirect to the desired page.
Test 2:
RedirectMatch 301 ^/category/subcategory/.*$ http://www.site.com/category/subcategory
Redirect on its own works perfectly for all URLs desired.
The problem is when we have both URLs in a clean .htaccess file, and the redirects are in the proper order (specific first, then general), the general redirect is being used.
Test 3:
Redirect 301 /category/subcategory/product http://www.site.com/product
RedirectMatch 301 ^/category/subcategory/.*$ http://www.site.com/category/subcategory
When we visit www.site.com/category/subcategory/product, the result is www.site.com/category/subcategory/product, That is not the desired result. Instead, we want the URL to be www.site.com/category/subcategory/product,
We have even tried modified the Redirect to:
Redirect 301 /category/subcategory/product http://www.site.com/product [L]
It made no difference.
Please help!
EDIT: Added 3/25/2014
What we are trying to do is provide specific redirects for a group of known products from their old product page to the new product page. We are also trying to add a "catch all" redirect for the remaining unknown products to the category page.
Here is an actual example redirect which works:
Redirect 301 /womens/western-dresses/stetson-cream-empire-waist-ls-western-dress http://www.site.com/stetson-cream-empire-waist-ls-western-dress
If the above redirect is added to the .htaccess file, it works perfectly on its own.
Here is a second example redirect which works:
RedirectMatch 301 ^/womens/western-dresses/.*$ http://www.site.com/womens/western-dresses
The problem is if we have both of the rules together in .htaccess, in the same order as above, the second rule is always triggered. We try to access www.site.com/womens/western-dresses/stetson-cream-empire-waist-ls-western-dress and the result is www.site.com/womens/western-dresses instead of the desired result of www.site.com/stetson-cream-empire-waist-ls-western-dress
For clarity:
if we remove the .htaccess file, the URL 404s
if only the first rule is listed, it triggers perfectly
if only the second rule is listed, the second rule triggers perfectly
if both rules are listed, the second rule triggers.
We have deleted all redirects from the .htaccess file. The only redirects are the below two lines. The issue remains where the first redirect is ignored. We have tried changing the start of the first redirect to ^/womens and ^womens but that change had no effect.
Redirect 301 /womens/western-dresses/stetson-cream-empire-waist-ls-western-dress http://www.site.com/stetson-cream-empire-waist-ls-western-dress
RedirectMatch 301 ^/womens/western-dresses/.*$ http://www.site.com/womens/western-dresses

Your post is a little confusing, so I may be misunderstanding what you are trying to do.
If memory serves, you should not include a leading slash in your pattern when using these directives in a .htaccess file. That usage is reserved for httpd.conf. When these directives are used in a .htaccess file, the leading path components have already been stripped by mod_access. I am guessing this is the cause of your troubles.
For example, this should work (not tested):
Redirect 301 ^category/subcategory/product http://www.site.com/product
RedirectMatch 301 ^category/subcategory/.* http://www.site.com/category/subcategory
As an aside, [L] is mod_rewrite lingo. "Redirect" and "RedirectMatch" are part of mod_access.
EDIT 3/25:
Redirect and RedirectMatch can be fussy when used in .htaccess files, particularly when dealing with non-existent folders and mixed directives. Can I suggest you move directly to mod_rewrite? While it has a steep learning curve, you will never go back once you get the hang of it.
# Assuming you are in a .htaccess under DocumentRoot:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^category/subcategory/product1\.html$ /product1.html [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^category/subcategory/product2\.html$ /product2.html [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^category/subcategory/.* /category/subcategory [R=301,L]
As an aside, this looks like a good candidate for RewriteMap, although you will need to declare the map in your httpd.conf.

Related

HTACCESS 301 redirect keep sending to the wrong page

I am trying to redirect an old page from a website I have redesigned, to the new one, but it's not working.
Here's my 2 lines of code in the .htaccess file regarding that domain:
Redirect 301 /deaneco http://solutionsgtr.ca/fr/deaneco/accueil.html
RewriteRule ^/deaneco/contact http://solutionsgtr.ca/fr/deaneco/contact.html [R=301,L,QSA]
If go on the solutionsgtr.ca/deaneco/contact URL, it gives me the following page:
http://solutionsgtr.ca/fr/deaneco/accueil.html/contact
The first rule works though (deaneco/ to solutionsgtr.ca/fr/deaneco/accueil.html).
I feel like both lines are being mixed together and are giving me the wrong page, that doesn't exist so I get a 404 error.
There are a couple of issues here:
The Redirect directive (part of mod_alias) is prefix-matching and everything after the match is appended on the end of the target URL. This explains the redirect you are seeing.
The RewriteRule (mod_rewrite) pattern ^/deaneco/contact will never match in a .htaccess context since the URL-path that is matched does not start with a slash. So, this rule is not doing anything currently.
You should avoid mixing redirects from both modules since they execute independently and at different times during the request (mod_rewrite executes first, despite the apparent order of the directives).
Either use mod_alias, ordering the directives most specific first:
Redirect 301 /deaneco/contact http://solutionsgtr.ca/fr/deaneco/contact.html
Redirect 301 /deaneco http://solutionsgtr.ca/fr/deaneco/accueil.html
NB: You will need to clear your browser cache, since the erroneous 301 (permanent) redirect will have been cached by the browser. Test with 302 (temporary) redirects to avoid potential caching issues.
OR, if you are already using mod_rewrite for other redirects/rewrites then consider using mod_rewrite instead (to avoid potential conflicts as mentioned above):
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^deaneco/contact$ http://solutionsgtr.ca/fr/deaneco/contact.html [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^deaneco$ http://solutionsgtr.ca/fr/deaneco/accueil.html [R=301,L]
The QSA flag is not required, since the query string is passed through to the substitution by default.
The order of the RewriteRule directives are not important in this instance, since they match just that specific URL.
If go on the solutionsgtr.ca/deaneco/contact URL
If you are redirecting to the same host then you don't need to explicitly include the scheme + hostname in the target URL, since this will default.

htaccess Redirect 301 is chaining itself

I have around 100+- redirects in a .htaccess file and some urls are chaining each other.
For example:
Redirect 301 /air-india-trial/air-india-promo-conditions/ /features/
Goes to
/trial/air-india-promo-conditions/
Because of
Redirect 301 /air-india-trial/ /trial/
So the URL is replacing '/air-india-trial/' for '/trial/' because of the 2nd redirect being called. I already tried to put https://example.com/ before the 2nd URL in the Redirect 301 but that doesn't work. Not sure if it matters but the URL /air-india-trial/ doesn't exist on the new website. The domain is the same as the old website tho. Anyone that has an idea to fix those redirect chains?
Redirect 301 /air-india-trial/air-india-promo-conditions/ /features/
Goes to
/trial/air-india-promo-conditions/
Presumably you mean a request for /air-india-trial/air-india-promo-conditions/ ends up being redirected to /trial/air-india-promo-conditions/ (that directive doesn't "go to" anything).
...because of the 2nd redirect being called. I already tried to put https://example.com/ before the 2nd url in the Redirect 301 but that doesn't work.
You can't put https://example.com/ as part of the URL in the first argument - if that is what you are referring to? It simply won't match. It matches against the URL-path only.
Since the Redirect directive is prefix-matching (and everything after the match is copied onto the end of the target URL), you need to order your Redirect directives in order of specificity. The most specific (ie. longest path) redirect needs to be before the less specific redirects.
mod_alias Redirect directives do not "chain" together as you seem to imply.
So, in your example, the following should work to redirect /air-india-trial/air-india-promo-conditions/ to /features/:
Redirect 301 /air-india-trial/air-india-promo-conditions/ /features/
Redirect 301 /air-india-trial/ /trial/
(Although you do perhaps suggest that the directives are already in order (or are you just referring to the order in your question)? In which case there is still a conflict with another directive or you are seeing a cached response.)
You will need to clear your browser cache after making this change as the 301 (permanent) redirect will be cached by the browser.
If you specifically want to redirect only /air-india-trial/ and not /air-india-trial/<something> then you need to use a RedirectMatch directive instead, which matches against a regex and is not prefix-matching. For example:
RedirectMatch 301 ^/air-india-trial/$ /trial/
Also, if you have any mod_rewrite (RewriteRule) redirects then these might conflict. Since different Apache modules runs independently and at different times throughout the request, you should avoid mixing redirects from both modules because of potential conflicts. (mod_rewrite will always run first on Apache 2.4, despite the apparent order of these directives in .htaccess.)

301 Redirect Rules for a Blog Migration

I want to implement 3 redirect rules for a blog migration where each page will be shifted to a sub-folder structure. It currently sits at a sub-domain.
I can't really screw this one up and want to make sure I nail the correct generic rules for the 3 type of existing URLs:
Homepage
Current:
https://blog.lang.example.com
Goal:
https://www.example.com/lang-country/news/
Category
Current:
https://blog.lang.example.com/category/category-name
Goal:
https://www.example.com/lang-country/news/category/category-name
Post
Current:
https://blog.lang.example.com/yyy/mm/dd/article-name
Goal:
https://www.example.com/lang-country/news/yyy/mm/dd/article-name
Is this something you can help?
Unless you have other URLs that you don't want to be redirected then you can do something like what you require with a single redirect near the top of the .htaccess file in the subdomain's document root.
For example:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^blog\.([^.]+)\.example\.com [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) https://www.example.com/%1-country/news/$1 [R,L]
Where %1 is a backreference to the lang subdomain in the requested host.
However, you still have the problem of where country should come from in the target URL, since this is not present in the source URL. You will either need to default this to something or implement some kind of lookup based on the language. This would need server config access (to configure a RewriteMap) if you wanted to do this in .htaccess. Or, you implement this redirect entirely in your server-side script (eg. PHP).
Note that this is currently a 302 (temporary) redirect. Only change this to a 301 (permanent) redirect once you have tested that everything is working OK (if a 301 is required). 301 redirects are cached hard by the browser so can make testing problematic.

Redirecting A File Anywhere In The Hierarchy

So, apparently some mobile ads drop a request for mraid.js into their page loads. That feels ridiculous to me, but there's not much I can do about that exactly. It looks like this:
If the page is /something, the request comes in as /something/mraid.js
But that also continues for cases like /something/else/mraid.js
No matter what the URL, it tacks on mraid.js.
I added a couple lines like this to the .htaccess file:
RedirectMatch 301 (.*)\mraid.js$ /mraid.js
or
RedirectMatch 301 ^\mraid.js$ /mraid.js
or
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/(.*)/mraid.js -f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /mraid.js [R=301,L]
With the hopes of redirecting them to a global (and blank) mraid.js file. This is just to load a file to stop the 404 errors in analytics, from what I'm told when mraid.js is needed it's loaded locally from within the mobile ad/app.
But none of those .htaccess rules seem to catch and redirect as I expect. Any ideas on how to always match mraid.js in the URL and pass it back to root?
After a bit more head-scratching, I figured it out. It was a combination of all three things that solved it for me. First, it had to match the pattern with ^(.*), then [L,R=301]. L for "this is the last rule", and R for "it's a permanent 301 redirect."
RewriteRule ^(.*)/mraid\.js$ /mraid\.js [L,R=301]

301 redirect throws an error saying the page being redirected does not exist

i want to redirect from a page at /roofing/bellevue/index.php to /bellevue-roofing.php I entered the following:
Redirect 301 /roofing/bellevue/index.php http://www.emeraldstate.com/bellevue-roofing.php
into .htaccess in the root directory.
The result of entering www.emeraldstate.com/roofing/bellevue/index.php is:
The requested URL /roofing/bellevue/index.php was not found on this server.
I have checked and rechecked various sources on formatting Redirects and everything seems correct. Can anyone provide a little guidance?
The correct implementation is to avoid specifying the domain name as part of the redirect. Whilst this will more than likely make no difference to your setup, I'm mentioning it anyway.
You'll be better off using RedirectMatch or mod_rewrite (which I prefer):
RedirectMatch 301 ^/roofing/bellevue/index.php$ /bellevue-roofing.php
Or use mod_rewrite (make sure that the extension is enabled, which it generally is):
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/roofing/bellevue/index.php$ /bellevue-roofing.php [R=301,L]

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