example.com and www.example.com points to two different apps

Question

The problem is simple, http://example.com and http://www.example.com aren't the same sites. The problem is surely in my VHost configuration:

PassengerMinInstances 5 PassengerPoolIdleTime 0

<VirtualHost *:80>
        ServerAdmin [email protected]
        ServerName example.com
        ServerAlias www.example.com
        DocumentRoot /home/someuser/www/example.com/public_html/public
        <Directory /home/someuser/www/example.com/public_html/public>
                AllowOverride all
                Options -MultiViews
        </Directory>
        ErrorLog /home/someuser/www/example.com/logs/error.log
        CustomLog /home/someuser/www/example.com/logs/access.log combined
        RailsBaseURI /
        PassengerSpawnMethod smart
</VirtualHost>

I have also removed any modules that weren't causing start up errors, these are the ones that are being loaded:

# ls mods-enabled
alias.conf  alias.load  authz_default.load  authz_groupfile.load  authz_host.load  authz_user.load

Answer 1

There are 2 big things to check here:

1. Do both domains resolve to the same IP address:

   Try host example.com and host www.example.com from your command line to see if the different requests are being routed to the same server.

   If not, you'll need to update the DNS for your domain to be consistant

2. Is Apache getting confused? For any given request, Apache will use the first virtual host in its config which has a matching ServerName or ServerAlias. Check that you don't have conflicting vhost configuration

Answer 2

Prefacing my answer with "I don't know anything about ruby".

You've stated http://example.com and http://www.example.com aren't the same sites but your vhost configuration is saying that they are.

ServerName example.com
ServerAlias www.example.com

Those directives are saying that this vhost will answer for both of those names. So, it souds like you just need to break out the www.example.com into its own vhost with its own ServerName directive.

<VirtualHost *:80>
        ServerAdmin [email protected]
        ServerName example.com
        DocumentRoot /home/someuser/www/example.com/public_html/public
        ....other stuff....
</VirtualHost>
<VirtualHost *:80>
        ServerAdmin [email protected]
        ServerName www.example.com
        DocumentRoot /home/someuser/www/www.example.com/public_html/public
        ....other stuff....
</VirtualHost>

If there is some magic in the way ruby handles vhosts, then my answer is useless :)

Answer 3

This vhost config solved my problem:

<VirtualHost *:80>
        ServerName example.com
        ServerAlias *.example.com
        DocumentRoot /home/someuser/www/example.com/public_html/public
        <Directory /home/someuser/www/example.com/public_html/public>
                Options FollowSymLinks
                AllowOverride none
                Order allow,deny
                Allow from all
        </Directory>
        ErrorLog /home/someuser/www/example.com/logs/error.log
        CustomLog /home/someuser/www/example.com/logs/access.log combined
        RewriteEngine On
        RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^example\.com$ [NC]
        RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.com$1 [R=301,L]
</VirtualHost>