Zero Mu Tech Articles

Using RedirectMatch in .htaccess to redirect entire web site

Categories: Apache |

When changing websites, I was trying to use Apache’s RedirectMatch to send all documents from one domain to another domain. I used code that I found on other websites, but I found that it didn’t do what I wanted.

What I wanted was for a user to put in http://www.olddomain.com/a_file.html and be redirected to http://newdomain.com/a_file.html. I wanted it to do that for each file, and I didn’t want to specify a redirect for each file. I didn’t want to use mod_rewrite because I wanted to give the 301 redirect for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) reasons.

Quick Answer: use RedirectMatch permanent ^(.*)$ http://www.newdomain.com$1 in a .htaccess file in your old domain.

Initially, I read that this line

RedirectMatch permanent ^(.*)$ http://www.newdomain.com

would redirect all files from the old domain to files on the new domain of the same name when placed in the .htaccess file in the /www/ directory of the old domain. However, when I tried this, all of my redirects simply redirected to the index file of the new domain. For example,

http://www.olddomain.com/file_a.html

http://www.olddomain.com/file_b.html

would both redirect to

http://www.newdomain.com/index.html

Then I modified the apache directive to

RedirectMatch permanent ^(.*)$ http://www.newdomain.com$1

and this worked for me. Even when I put in a bad filename, I got my new domain’s 404 error document.

Not sure why I found RedirectMatch permanent ^(.*)$ http://www.newdomain.com in several sources and it didn’t work…