Category: Managing Linux Apache MySQL PHP (LAMP)

Force non www and https and vice-versa with .htaccess

Redirect web from www to non-www and from HTTP to HTTPS with .htaccess.

http://example.com
http://www.example.com
redirect to
https://example.com

Insert following code at the top of .htaccess

# pass the default character set
AddDefaultCharset utf-8

Options All -Indexes
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On
# NOW WWW HTTPS
#RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\. [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(?:www\.)?(.+)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^ https://%1%{REQUEST_URI} [L,NE,R=301]

If the default URL to be www.example.com

# pass the default character set
AddDefaultCharset utf-8

Options All -Indexes
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On
# NOW WWW HTTPS
#RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\. [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(?:www\.)?(.+)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^ https://www.%1%{REQUEST_URI} [L,NE,R=301]

How it works

RewriteEngine On

The first line enables the Apache runtime rewriting engine, required to perform the redirect. You may have already enabled it in a previous config in the same file. If that’s the case, you can skip that line.

RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\. [NC]

These two lines are are the redirect conditions, they are used to determine if the request should be redirected. Because the conditions are joined with an [OR], if any of those two conditions returns true, Apache will execute the rewrite rule (the redirect).

The first condition determines if the request is using a non-HTTPS URL. The second condition determines if the request is using the www URL. Notice that I used www\. and not www., because the pattern is a regular expression and the . dot has a special meaning here, hence it must be escaped.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(?:www\.)?(.+)$ [NC]

The forth line is a convenient line I used to avoid referending the hostname directly in the URL. It matches the HOST of the incoming request, and decomposes it into www part (if any), and rest of the hostname. We’ll reference it later with %1 in the RewriteRule.

If you know the host name in advance, you may improve the rule by inlining the URL and skipping this condition (see later).

RewriteRule ^ https://www.%1%{REQUEST_URI} [L,NE,R=301]

The RewriteRule is the heart of the redirect. With this line we tell Apache to redirect any request to a new URL, composed by:

https://www.
%1: the reference to the non-www part of the host
%{REQUEST_URI}: the URI of the request, without the hostname

All these tokens are joined together, and represents the final redirect URI. Finally, we append 3 flags:

NE to not escape special characters
R=301 to use the HTTP 301 redirect status

L to stop processing other rules, and redirect immediately

Remarks

As I’ve already mentioned, my example uses an extra RewriteCond line to extract the host name, and avoid to inline the hostname in the rule. If you feel this is a performance penalty for you, you can inline the host directly in the rule:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\. [NC]
RewriteRule ^ https://example.com%{REQUEST_URI} [L,NE,R=301]

Origin article from https://simonecarletti.com/blog/2016/08/redirect-domain-http-https-www-apache/

mod_rewrite installed by default on Apache2 installation,

Check verify the existence of /etc/apache2/mods-available/rewrite.load.

#cat /etc/apache2/mods-available/rewrite.load

LoadModule rewrite_module /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_rewrite.so

Enable and load mod_rewrite

#a2enmod rewrite

The above command will create a symbolic link in /etc/apache2/mods-enabled.

#ls -al /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/rewrite.load

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 30 Dec 7 05:26 /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/rewrite.load -> ../mods-available/rewrite.load

Then open and edit /etc/apache2/sites-available/default configuration. Replace every occurrence of “AllowOverride None” with “AllowOverride all”.

#vim /etc/apache2/sites-available/default

Finally, restart Apache2.

#service apache2 restart

Disable mod_rewrite Module in Apache2

To disable module use a2dismod command

#a2dismod rewrite

Finally, restart Apache2.

#service apache2 restart

Install Aptitude command following aptitude update command

#apt-get install aptitude

Up-to-date and upgrade the system to current version

#aptitude update && aptitude safe-upgrade

Or update Debian system with apt-get command

#apt-get update && apt-get upgrade

Install Apache

#apt-get install apache2

Install mysql server

#apt-get install mysql-server

Finish up by running the MySQL set up script:

#mysql_secure_installation

Install PHP

#apt-get install php5 && apt-get install php-pear && apt-get install php5-mysql && apt-get install php5-gd

Finish up by restarting apache:

#service apache2 restart

Error 

Could not reliably determine the server’s fully qualified ***. Solved by Add ServerName localhost at /etc/apache2/apache2.conf at end of line

ServerName localhost

Enable and load mod_rewrite Apache2 on Debian 8

#a2enmod rewrite

Then open and edit /etc/apache2/apache2.conf find

Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Require all granted

Replace “AllowOverride None” to “AllowOverride all”

Enable Apache2 mod_headers & mod_expires on

To increase PageSpeed: Leverage browser caching.

enable mod_headers:

#a2enmod headers
Enabling module headers
To activate the new configuration, you need to run:
service apache2 restart

enable mod_expires:

#a2enmod expires
Enabling module expires
To activate the new configuration, you need to run:
service apache2 restart

Then restart Apache server to make these changes effective

#service apache2 restart

Enable apache mod_rewrite for seo user friendly url CentOS 6

The mod_rewrite module on httpd conf is enabled by default on CentOS 6. check if mod_rewrite.so module has been installed and activate at httpd configuration.

#cat /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf | grep mod_rewrite
LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so

** If it is commented (#), please remove it (#) out.

Enable .htaccess File for seo user friendly
Once the mod_rewrite module has been activated, you can set up your URL rewrites by creating an .htaccess file in your default document root directory.

A .htaccess file allows us to modify our rewrite rules without accessing server configuration files. For this reason, .htaccess is critical to your web server. Before we begin, we need to allow Apache to read .htaccess files located under the /var/www/html directory.

You can do this by editing httpd.conf file:

#vi /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

Find the section <directory /var/www/html> and change AllowOverride None to AllowOverride All, there are 2 AllowOverride Off must change to AllowOverride On

<Directory /var/www/html>
AllowOverride All
</Directory>

# AllowOverride controls what directives may be placed in .htaccess files.
# It can be "All", "None", or any combination of the keywords:
# Options FileInfo AuthConfig Limit
#
AllowOverride All
#

Save and exit.

Now restart Apache to put the change into effect:

#service httpd restart