Comments on: YA htaccess Q

Question: YA htaccess Q

mikel — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 14:10:35 -0800

Another redirect question.

My wife has just shifted her weblog from a folder on my server to another server. I want anyone who links to:

http://mysite.com/wife/path/to/file/file.html

to be automatically redirected to:

http://wifesite.com/path/to/file/file.html

Note there are several different paths to files - and this structure will remain identical (for now) on the new server.

I've looked at the other Mod_rewrite and htaccess tagged posts here, and they seem promising, but I can't get them to work. This is likely because I am an idiot, I know, but please be charitable!

By: frykitty

frykitty — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 14:48:49 -0800

Instead of trying to do it with .htaccess, change the index.php to read:

<?php
header("Location: http://wifesite.com/path/to/file/file.html");
?>

Just make sure .htaccess has the line:

DirectoryIndex index.php

By: frykitty

frykitty — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 14:49:40 -0800

Hmm. That php command is all on one line in my file. Sorry about that.

By: freudianslipper

freudianslipper — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 15:35:10 -0800

how about a meta refresh tag? maybe even put a note saying "you will be redirected in 3 seconds, please update your bookmarks" as is pretty standard.

link to example.

By: cillit bang

cillit bang — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 15:45:10 -0800

If you have access to httpd.conf:

RedirectMatch permanent ^/wife(.+)$ http://www.wifesite.com$1

By: holloway

holloway — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 16:06:02 -0800

Meta and PHP won't catch all pages on the site (unless you're willing to change all of the pages to have metatags or use this php).

.htaccess is the best way.

(Well php could work if you use htaccess to rewrite all /wife traffic to a PHP page with redirect logic in there, but that sounds like much more work)

By: holloway

holloway — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 16:06:25 -0800

Er, .htaccess or httpd.conf, of course.

By: freudianslipper

freudianslipper — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 22:42:31 -0800

oh i see now why a simple meta refresh won't exactly work in your case. well if you didn't get it working perhaps this link would help? link

so I would think if you did something like this all on one line:

Redirect http://mysite.com/wife/path/to/file/ http://wifesite.com/path/to/file/file.html

But I haven't tested it myself.

By: jozxyqk

jozxyqk — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 03:42:46 -0800

You could also use a 404 trick.
Put nothing in the /wife directory but an htaccess file with:

ErrorDocument 404 http://path/to/some/404.cgi

And your 404 CGI munges up the REQUEST_URI environment variable and spits out a Location header.

In Perl, it would look something like:

#!/usr/bin/perl

$foo = $ENV{REQUEST_URI};
$foo =~ s|^/wife||;
print "Location: http://wifesite.com$foo\n\n";

By: mikel

mikel — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 10:35:09 -0800

Just a followup cause I know people like that...

It turns out there was some issue with the hosting company and htaccess files, that's why it wasn't working in the first place. I resolved that and the standard redirect fromhere tohere syntax is perfect.

I marked that answer best even though that's what I was trying myself in the first place, but thanks everyone for their contributions.