

Ask HN: Help with this 301 redirect? - brandnewlow
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1244076/htaccess-redirect-for-subdomains-similarly-named-subdirectories

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jacquesm
mod_rewrite will do this for you without any work on your part.

Simply move your data and set up mod_rewrite to allow access to the data in
its old location.

You can 301 it but there are all sorts of pitfalls to avoid there. (not sure
how much traffic you get from search engines but they tend to react badly to
redirects if not done very carefully)

~~~
brandnewlow
Not sure I follow 100%.

I've got a drupal site configured so the groups have URLs like
groupname.domain.com/

I'm using the subdomain module (<http://drupal.org/project/subdomain>) to
create these "fake" subdomains.

For a few reasons, I want to move to a structure like this:

domain.com/groups/groupname

I can switch off the subdomain module and change the paths to my existing
groups to take the desired format. But I need to redirect all traffic going to
the old URLs to the new ones.

You're saying adding a Redirect to my htaccess isn't the best way to go? The
guy over on stack overflow suggested a rule but it creates an infinite
redirect loop.

~~~
jacquesm
The infinite redirect loop means that your rule is buggy, but that is the way
to go.

Probably you are matching too much.

with the information you gave above I see a much simpler way to solve this:

Set up your webserver (I'm assuming apache) to map www.yourdomain.com and
yourdomain.com to one virtual host and _.yourdomain.com to another.

Then do the .htaccess in the root of the virtualhost associated with
_.yourdomain.com

That way you can not make any infinite loops.

good luck!

~~~
brandnewlow
Thanks. I'll look into that. I'm working on understanding the syntax of these
rules, but it's been slow going.

~~~
jacquesm
mod_rewrite is one of the nastier apache modules, it's like a swiss army knife
with 75 blades, there is always a way to do what you want but you'll end up
with some blood on your shirt, even if you're careful.

Don't sweat it, everybody goes through this phase when they start with
mod_rewrite, then after a while it gets easier.

