Redirecting and Remapping with mod_rewrite
backward compatibility ruleset for
rewriting document.html to document.php
when and only when document.php exists RewriteEngine on RewriteBase /var/www/htdocs RewriteCond $1.php -f RewriteCond $1.html !-f RewriteRule ^(.*).html
first try to find it in dir1/
...and if found stop and be happy: RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/dir1/%{REQUEST_URI} -f RewriteRule ^(.+) %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/dir1/$1 [L]
second try to find it in dir2/
...and if found stop and be happy: RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/dir2/%{REQUEST_URI} -f RewriteRule ^(.+) %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/dir2/$1 [L]
else go on for other Alias or ScriptAlias directives,
etc. RewriteRule ^ - [PT]
map.mirrors -- Multiplexing Map
[HostNameLookups](../mod/core.html
to redirect and remap request. This includes many examples of common uses of modrewrite, including detailed descriptions of how each works.modrewrite
Assume we have recently renamed the page foo.html
and now want to provide the old URL for backward compatibility. However, we want that users of the old URL even not recognize that the pages was renamed - that is, we don't want the address to change in their browser.
We rewrite the old URL to the new one internally via the following rule:
and now want to provide the old URL for backward compatibility. But this time we want that the users of the old URL get hinted to the new one, i.e. their browsers Location field should change, too.
We force a HTTP redirect to the new URL which leads to a change of the browsers and thus the users view:
In this example, as contrasted to the internal example above, we can simply use the Redirect directive. mod_rewrite was used in that earlier example in order to hide the redirect from the client:
If a resource has moved to another server, you may wish to have URLs continue to work for a time on the old server while people update their bookmarks.
to redirect these URLs to the new server, but you might also consider using the Redirect or RedirectMatch directive.mod_rewrite
#With mod_rewrite RewriteEngine on RewriteRule ^/docs/(.+) http://new.example.com/docs/$1 [R,L]
into a dynamic variant foo.cgi
in a seamless way, i.e. without notice by the browser/user.
We just rewrite the URL to the CGI-script and force the handler to be cgi-script so that it is executed as a CGI program. This way a request to /~quux/foo.html
How can we make URLs backward compatible (still existing virtually) after migrating document.YYYY
, e.g. after translating a bunch of .html
We rewrite the name to its basename and test for existence of the new extension. If it exists, we take that name, else we rewrite the URL to its original state.
This example uses an often-overlooked feature of modrewrite, by taking advantage of the order of execution of the ruleset. In particular, modrewrite evaluates the left-hand-side of the RewriteRule before it evaluates the RewriteCond directives. Consequently, $1 is already defined by the time the RewriteCond directives are evaluated. This allows us to test for the existence of the original (document.html
) files using the same base filename.
This ruleset is designed to use in a per-directory context (In a
checks are looking at the correct directory path. You may need to set a
directive to specify the directory base that you're working in.RewriteBase
The very best way to solve this doesn't involve mod_rewrite at all, but rather uses the
directive placed in a virtual host for the non-canonical hostname(s).Redirect
You can alternatively accomplish this using the
Or, for example, to redirect a portion of your site to HTTPS, you might do the following:
If, for whatever reason, you still want to use mod_rewrite
- if, for example, you need this to work with a larger set of RewriteRules - you might use one of the recipes below.
For sites running on a port other than 80:
RewriteCond %{HTTPHOST} !^www\.example\.com [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTPHOST} !^$ RewriteCond %{SERVERPORT} !^80$ RewriteRule ^/?(.*) http://www.example.com:%{SERVERPORT}/$1 [L,R,NE]
If you wanted to do this generically for all domain names - that is, if you want to redirect example.com to www.example.com for all possible values of example.com, you could use the following recipe:
These rulesets will work either in your main server configuration file, or in a .htaccess
A particular resource might exist in one of several places, and we want to look in those places for the resource when it is requested. Perhaps we've recently rearranged our directory structure, dividing content into several locations.
The following ruleset searches in two directories to find the resource, and, if not finding it in either place, will attempt to just serve it out of the location requested.
RewriteEngine on # first try to find it in dir1/... # ...and if found stop and be happy: RewriteCond %{DOCUMENTROOT}/dir1/%{REQUESTURI} -f RewriteRule ^(.+) %{DOCUMENTROOT}/dir1/$1 [L] # second try to find it in dir2/... # ...and if found stop and be happy: RewriteCond %{DOCUMENTROOT}/dir2/%{REQUESTURI} -f RewriteRule ^(.+) %{DOCUMENTROOT}/dir2/$1 [L] # else go on for other Alias or ScriptAlias directives, # etc. RewriteRule ^ - [PT]
We have numerous mirrors of our website, and want to redirect people to the one that is located in the country where they are located.
Looking at the hostname of the requesting client, we determine which country they are coming from. If we can't do a lookup on their IP address, we fall back to a default server.
HostnameLookups on RewriteEngine on RewriteMap multiplex txt:/path/to/map.mirrors RewriteCond %{REMOTE_HOST} ([a-z]+)$ [NC] RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ ${multiplex:%1|http://www.example.com/}$1 [R,L]
de http://www.example.de/
uk http://www.example.uk/
, which can be a significant performance hit.The
directive captures the last portion of the hostname of the requesting client - the country code - and the following RewriteRule uses that value to look up the appropriate mirror host in the map file.RewriteCond
We wish to provide different content based on the browser, or user-agent, which is requesting the content.
We have to decide, based on the HTTP header "User-Agent", which content to serve. The following config does the following: If the HTTP header "User-Agent" contains "Mozilla/3", the page foo.html
and the rewriting stops. If the browser is "Lynx" or "Mozilla" of version 1 or 2, the URL becomes foo.20.html
RewriteCond %{HTTPUSERAGENT} ^Mozilla/3.* RewriteRule ^foo\.html$ foo.NS.html [L] RewriteCond %{HTTPUSERAGENT} ^Lynx/ [OR] RewriteCond %{HTTPUSERAGENT} ^Mozilla/[12] RewriteRule ^foo\.html$ foo.20.html [L] RewriteRule ^foo\.html$ foo.32.html [L]
On some webservers there is more than one URL for a resource. Usually there are canonical URLs (which are be actually used and distributed) and those which are just shortcuts, internal ones, and so on. Independent of which URL the user supplied with the request, they should finally see the canonical one in their browser address bar.
We do an external HTTP redirect for all non-canonical URLs to fix them in the location view of the Browser and for all subsequent requests. In the example ruleset below we replace /puppies
RewriteRule ^/(puppies|canines)/(.*) /dogs/$2 [R]
of the webserver directly relates to the URL "DocumentRoot/
". But often this data is not really of top-level priority. For example, you may wish for visitors, on first entering a site, to go to a particular subdirectory /about/
Note that this can also be handled using the
Note also that the example rewrites only the root URL. That is, it rewrites a request for http://example.com/
. If you have in fact changed your document root - that is, if all of your content is in fact in that subdirectory, it is greatly preferable to simply change your
However, in earlier versions of Apache, or if your needs are more complicated than this, you can use a variation of the following rewrite set to accomplish the same thing:
If, on the other hand, you wish to pass the requested URI as a query string argument to index.php, you can replace that RewriteRule with:
Modules | Directives | FAQ | Glossary | Sitemap
Apache HTTP Server Version 2.4
Redirecting and Remapping with mod_rewrite
Available Languages: en | fr
This document supplements the mod_rewrite reference documentation. It describes how you can use mod_rewrite to redirect and remap request. This includes many examples of common uses of mod_rewrite, including detailed descriptions of how each works.
mod_rewritemod_rewrite- From Old to New (internal)
- Rewriting From Old to New (external)
- Resource Moved to Another Server
- From Static to Dynamic
- Backward Compatibility for file extension change
- Canonical Hostnames
- Search for pages in more than one directory
- Redirecting to Geographically Distributed Servers
- Browser Dependent Content
- Canonical URLs
- Moved DocumentRoot
- Fallback Resource
DocumentRootSee also
- Module documentation
- mod_rewrite introduction
- Controlling access
- Virtual hosts
- Proxying
- Using RewriteMap
- Advanced techniques
- When not to use mod_rewrite