How to serve different robots.txt for http and https on same site?

Question

I got a small site which served by Apache (I can't put Nginx in front nor change Apache to anything), and it is set up to serve the same site both over http and https (no redirects http->https is there so far, so both http and https versions are served in parallel).

What I need is to set up .htaccess so the same URI via http and via https to serve different text file?

Like http://example.com/proto.txt says "The site is over http" while https://example.com/proto.txt would say "The site served over https".

Answer 1

Use an Alias

Create two files, robots.txt and robots_http.txt and add this to your http VirtualHost:

Alias "/robots.txt" "/path/to/documentroot/robots_http.txt"

Answer 2

If you can't or won't change the "main" Apache config but need to do it in a .htaccess file, you can use a RewriteRule with a RewriteCond that checks for HTTPS.

Something along the lines of:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTPS} "on"
RewriteRule robots.txt robots_https.txt [L]

should probably work (I didn't test it).

Note that this is based on Apache doing HTTPS termination itself. If HTTPS termination is done on a reverse proxy before it, then the condition will likely be different (and will depend on the configuration of the reverse proxy and Apache).