Old URL/ New URL 301 redirect (Apache/ htaccess)

Give this a try. Place this code before the other rewrite rules.

  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
  RewriteRule ^old-url.php$ /new-url [R=301,L]

The ^old-url.php$ specifies the pattern should match the exact page old-url.php The ^ specifies the 'start of line' and the $ is the 'end of line'.

Of course, you can, and probably should, use regular expressions in place of old-url.php to do much more dynamic pattern matching.

The /new-url specifies the substitute path as /new-url The leading / is necessary or else Apache will append the DOCUMENT_ROOT variable before the intended substitute path.

The [R=301,L] says to do a 301 redirect and stop processing any rewrite rules which come after this one.

My situation was similar, but had some key differences. So, here's a slightly more advanced example. Disclaimer: I don't claim to be expert in mod_rewrite and any improvements to this code are welcome.

I'm working with a virtual host and wanted to apply a different rule based on the domain name. One way to accomplish this is to add an extra RewriteCond which checks the current host / domain name.

  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} (www.)?drupal.org
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
  RewriteRule ^(.*)\.asp(.*)$ http://drupal.org/foobar? [R=301,L]

The example directly above says to check Apache's HTTP_HOST variable (e.g. the portion of the domain name between http:// and before the first / ) and see if it matches a specified domain. In this case, I'm using a ? (question mark) regular expression to match drupal.org with or without a www. , so this would match www.drupal.org or drupal.org

Then, do the normal checks that the url isn't already a valid file RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f and is not a valid directory RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d. RewriteConds listed one after another are implicitly linked with AND, so all three conditions must pass for the RewriteRule to actually rewrite the url.

Finally, I rewrite anything with a .asp in the url and redirect it to a page. Broken down it's:

• ^ -- the start of line
• (.*) -- 0 or more of any character
• \. -- a literal period. Without the \ it would be interpreted as a 'any single character'
• asp
• (.*) -- 0 or more of any character (this will pick up anything after .asp, including query strings like ?x=100)
• $ -- end of line
• http://drupal.org/foobar -- the redirect address
• ? -- don't append the query string from the original address
• [R=301,L] -- do a 301 redirect and stop processing any rewrite rules

Note, the ? after foobar is necessary if you want to remove the query string from the end of the substitute path. For example, without the ? , a visitor to foobar.asp?x=100 would be directed to http://drupal.org/foobar?x=100 . With the ? , the x=100 is chopped off.

Note 2, the redirect page needn't be static. You could redirect to something like http://drupal.org/$1? where $1 is the first regular expression region (in this case, whatever comes before .asp)

I used http://httpd.apache.org/docs/trunk/rewrite/rewrite_intro.html for a simple explanation of regular expressions and Apache's rewrite documentation http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_rewrite.html#rewriterule for an explanation of mod_rewrite stuff.

Jim

OrangeCoat.com