.htaccess Rewrite Rule not rewriting alias

.htaccessapache-2.2rewrite

I am attempting to serve up a different robots.txt for alternate subdomains that I am using for domain sharding so that google doesn't index m1.example.com and m2.example.com.

/etc/httpd/sites-enabled/www.example.com

Alias /robots.txt /var/www/html/robots.txt
....
ServerName www.example.com
ServerAlias m1.example.com m2.example.com
....
DocumentRoot /var/www/www.example.com/public

/var/www/www.example.com/public/.htaccess

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !=www.example.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^/robots\.txt$ /var/www/html/robots-disallow.txt [L]
....

When I hit m1.example.com/robots.txt it displays the robots.txt not robots-disallow.txt.

If I add the rewrite rule to my vhost in /etc/httpd/sites-enabled/www.example.com it works fine but not in the .htaccess

Best Answer

I solved the problem by removing the forward slash in the .htaccess for ^/robots.txt$ now it looks like:

RewriteRule ^robots\.txt$ /var/www/html/robots-disallow.txt [L]

In the vhost conf it worked with the / in the .htaccess once I removed the / it worked not sure why but that solved it for me.

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Tomcat – Apache2 – mod_expire and mod_rewrite not working in httpd.conf – serving content from tomcat

Probably the ProxyPass / directive you have in your config routes all requests to the Tomcat backend, bypassing all your mod_rewrite directives. You can try to remove the ProxyPass directive and use RewriteRule with the [P] flag after your other rewrites:

mod_rewrite: P|proxy

For the expire headers the situation is worse — in another similar question a solution was not found.

Option +FollowSymLinks would be needed for using mod_rewrite in .htaccess files; in your case it is not required, because you can put everything in the Apache config. Moving rules from config to .htaccess is pointless and can only make things slower. However, there is an important difference between .htaccess and the Apache config — in .htaccess patterns in RewriteRule are matched against relative filesystem paths (which never start with /), while in the VirtualHost context these patterns are matched against the URL path after the hostname, which always starts with /. Therefore at least one of your rules is incorrect:

RewriteRule ^content/(js|css)/([a-z]+)-([0-9]+)\.(js|css)$ /content/$1/$2.$4

should be

RewriteRule ^/content/(js|css)/([a-z]+)-([0-9]+)\.(js|css)$ /content/$1/$2.$4

(note the additional slash in the beginning).

Ubuntu – How to change the document root of a Linux Apache server

You should have a file: /etc/apache2/sites-available/default this is where you would modify the default website's document root.

You can also add more sites by putting config snippets in that folder and symlinking them to ../sites-enabled or using a2ensite to enable them.

Best Answer

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Tomcat – Apache2 – mod_expire and mod_rewrite not working in httpd.conf – serving content from tomcat

Ubuntu – How to change the document root of a Linux Apache server

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