How should I setup apatch for proper subdomain redirection

Question

I've got a domain lets say it's domain.com. This domain goes to a server with apache on this server I'm running three sites for that domain which are:

domain.com (default) dev.domain.com mail.domain.com

Each of those domains got a directory in my ~/public-www/ folder with the same name.

I want www.domain.com to redirect me to domain.com, I want development.domain.com to redirect me to dev.domain.com, I want email.domain.com and epost.domain.com to redirect me to mail.domain.com and I want all other subdomains to redirect me to the default domain.com site.

How should I config my apache2 sites in order to work like that and to do proper redirections. Someone told me that for searchengines to index and rank my sites properly the redirection have to be done with a 301 redirection or something like that.

Answer 1

You will first have to check that you have activated virtual hosting and ensure that the module mod_rewrite is loaded.

Then, write in your file httpd.conf or a separate file your different virtual hosts:

• start with the virtual hosts for domain.com, dev.domain.com and mail.domain.com
• then, configure virtual hosts for development.domain.com, epost.domain.com and email.domain.com
• the last one for the redirection of www.domain.com and the other subdomains.

For instance, in order to redirect email.domain.com to mail.domain.com, you can use something similar to the following:

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName email.domain.com
  ServerAlias epost.domain.com

  <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteEngine on
    RewriteRule ^(.*) http://mail.domain.com$1 [R=301,L]
  </IfModule>
</VirtualHost>

You can adapt it for development.domain.com.

Regarding www.domain.com, you can use *.domain.com in the ServerAlias directive to match all other subdomains.