Redirecting to and from the ‘www’ Subdomain with .htaccess

November 16, 2011

Here are a few snippets that will come in handy if you ever need to redirect www.example.com to example.com or vice versa.  There are a number of similar methods out there, but I prefer these as you don’t need to modify anything between development and production.

## www.domain.com → domain.com
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(.+)$ [NC]
    RewriteRule ^ http://%1%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]
</IfModule>
## domain.com → www.domain.com
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\..+$ [NC]
    RewriteRule ^ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]
</IfModule>

If you plan on using these, you’ll need to make sure you have the mod_rewrite module enabled on your server.

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