.htaccess non-www to www

Noticed my rewrite rule is no longer working and would like some help in fixing it . Does it have anything to do with the L flag?

Please and thanks.

Code:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -l [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule ^.*$ - [NC,L]
RewriteRule ^(data|js|styles|install) - [NC,L]
RewriteRule ^.*$ index.php [NC,L]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^url\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.url.com/$1 [R=301,L]

http://dense13.com/blog/2008/02/27/redirecting-non-www-to-www-with-htaccess/
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=184337#post1800674
http://www.besthostratings.com/articles/force-www-htaccess.html

??? What I have worked before, it's something in the xenForo .htaccess that caused it to stop working.

Any custom rewrite & redirect rules need to be placed before xenforo's rewrite rules.
Try this:

Code:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^url\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.url.com/$1 [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -l [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule ^.*$ - [NC,L]
RewriteRule ^(data|js|styles|install) - [NC,L]
RewriteRule ^.*$ index.php [NC,L]

Death to www. prefix!

Thanks for the suggestion, when I tried it earlier it redirected to the wrong url though.

eg: http://url.com/threads/title.1/ would go to http://url.com/index.php/title.1/

This is what I use on xenfans to force away the www. part to go back to xenfans.com before anything.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.xenfans\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://xenfans.com/$1 [R=301,L]

So you could try:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^xenfans\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.xenfans.com/$1 [R=301,L]

that works, thanks

Glad to hear it did.

Figured out it was the trailing dollar sign that was screwing it up, I don't even know why it's there... never noticed because the redirection worked fine in SMF.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^url\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.url.com/$1 [R=301,L]

I removed the $ and it works fine now . Thanks for the help everyone.

So if anyone else is stuck, copy the following and place it immediately after RewriteEngine On and before the Xenforo rewrites.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^url\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.url.com/$1 [R=301,L]

I think unless you have subdomains, the www is unnecessary.

The bigger issue is cookie issues when some people visit your website from www. and some don't. So just for cookie reasons, enforcing either www. or no www. is a good idea.

http://no-www.org/

I favour the www though , just looks more balanced to me. Redirects keep everything consistent so you don't end up with two different URLs pointing to the same content. The www and non-www URLs are also indexed separately unless you have redirected them or set a preference in Google Webmaster Tools.

http://www.www.extra-www.org/
http://www.yes-www.org/

I haven't even typed 'www' in the address bar for about 5 years now. It's just not necessary anymore. As for having it in the URL, I stopped doing that about 3 years ago. The link that cheeseshredder posted above explains it all.

I do have a rewrite rule so that it always shows "www".
Because XF-software logged me out when being on the domain including "www" and then entered the domain without "www", so saying I got logged out from the website by just removing the "www" from the URL I typed into my browser....... strange

Found a good article that explains all about www and non-www here : http://tiny.cc/9fkrs

It's like Internet Explorer 6 and vBulletin -> outdated.

We're in a world now where every 1 year old has an iPad or whatever, and I think by now we can assume people know they're on the Internet and now at gopher or a subdomain.

Analogue people say: I am on the Facebook
10 years ago that was: I am on double you double you double you dot come Facebook

Now they all tweet: I am on Facebook and I google, brb, tweeting, ehl oh elh.

still, try to type facebook.com into your browser, it shows the domain including "www"

I do this same thing using PHP that i added to the config.php file. It basically does the same thing but doesn't use the mod rewrite engine. Isn't it more...efficient?

www. is an optional subdomain.