Make website available without entering www

Question

I have a website which can be reached through www.example.com. Now I want to make it also accessible under example.com. How can I make this?

I have several subdomains e.g. test.example.com, test2.example.com etc. I also read a bit and found out that one should use htaccess to permanently redirect from example.com to www.example.com.

RewriteCond %{http_host} ^example.com [nc]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

So now there should no duplicate content and it should be SEO friendly. But how do I have to create the A-record? Now there is only one with www.example.com. If I create one with example.com it will automatically mapped to example.com.example.com ...

Then I have to add an entry in the host-file. Does this look like this?

192.168.1.1 example.com

Than I have some entries for the VirtualHost for apache. Is this file correct?

<VirtualHost 192.168.1.1:80>
 ServerName www.example.com
ServerAlias *.www.example.com
ServerAlias example.com

ServerAdmin webmaster@example.com

 DocumentRoot /var/www/html/path

 <Directory /var/www/html/path>
  AllowOverride None
  Options +FollowSymLinks -Indexes -Includes +Multiviews +ExecCGI
  Order allow,deny
  Allow from all
  AllowOverride All
 </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Solution:

<VirtualHost 192.168.1.1:80>
    ServerName example.com
    Redirect 301 / http://www.example.com/
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost 192.168.1.1:80>
    ServerName www.example.com
    ServerAlias *.www.example.com

    ServerAdmin webmaster@example.com

    DocumentRoot /var/www/html/path

    <Directory /var/www/html/path>
        AllowOverride None
        Options +FollowSymLinks -Indexes -Includes +Multiviews +ExecCGI
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
        AllowOverride All
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

I made this together with two A-records (one for www.example.com and example.com) pointing to the IP-Adress where the webserver resides. Additionally, I had the following entry in /etc/hosts

192.168.1.1 www.example.com example.com

I also state my whitelist-entry from squid:

.example.com

Answer 1

But how do I have to create the A-record? Now there is only one with www.example.com. If I create one with example.com it will automatically mapped to example.com.example.com ...

Why example.com.example.com? Just get your DNS host to put in a A record for @ (the domain itself) pointing at the server's IP address.

Then I have to add an entry in the host-file

Not if it's in the DNS, no, you don't.

Than I have some entries for the VirtualHost for apache. Is this file correct?

My personal preference would be to put the "bare" domain name in its own section, with a trivial Redirect permanent directive to push users to the www site.

This will avoid the (admittedly modest) performance hit of having to parse .htaccess files with conditional redirects in them.

It also means that you'll get separate log files for the two names. IMHO this is a good thing - it'll make it easier to tell which domain users are actually arriving from, and avoid the double entry that you'd get in the log if it was done within one virtual server.

Answer 2

As for dns entry you should have do it like this:

example.com.        A      192.168.x.y
www.example.com.    CNAME  example.com.

If you have only host file for testing so should do like this:

192.168.1.1 example.com 
192.168.1.1 www.example.com

In that case virtual host file should look like this:

<VirtualHost 192.168.1.1:80>
ServerName example.com
ServerAlias *.example.com

ServerAdmin webmaster@example.com

DocumentRoot /var/www/html/path

<Directory /var/www/html/path>
    AllowOverride None
    Options +FollowSymLinks -Indexes -Includes +Multiviews +ExecCGI
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
    AllowOverride All
</Directory>

htaccess file should not be used