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I've recently received a request from the site owner to redirect our base domain to a specific landing page on a subdomain, which is working just fine. The problem is that he wants the URL to remain the same, so the user will see mydomain.com but go to sub.mydomain.com/index.php?landing

I did some research and found that the proper way to redirect a user while keeping the URL intact is to proxy the request, which, as far as I can tell, can be accomplished with the P flag in a RewriteRule. However, despite confirming that mod_proxy is indeed installed via WHM, the URL still gets rewritten to the landing page in the browser. Here's the relevant section of my .htaccess file for reference:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www.)?mydomain.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://sub\.mydomain\.com/index\.php\?landing/ [P]

This is an AWS server using WHM/cPanel on CentOS 7.8 with a standard LAMP stack. I feel like this is probably something simple that I'm overlooking, so hopefully someone can provide some insight. I've used mod_rewrite many times in the past, but I've never had to proxy a request like this.

Justin Folvarcik
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  • If this was previously implemented as a 301 (_permanent_) redirect then make sure you're not seeing a cached response. What is the "redirect" you are seeing exactly? If the subdomain is triggering the redirect then you'll need to configure `ProxyPassReverse` in the server config. Is the main domain and subdomain pointing to different filesystems/servers? (If they are on the same filesystem then you may not need to proxy the request?) – MrWhite Sep 25 '20 at 20:38
  • @MrWhite It was previously a 301, but it's not just a cached response. The .htaccess I provided above is at the doc root of the main domain, redirecting it to the subdomain. The subdomain doesn't redirect anything. The redirect is working; I just don't want the URL to change. These are indeed on the same server, although the subdomain is stored in a different user's home (which really shouldn't be an issue, truthfully). – Justin Folvarcik Sep 25 '20 at 21:34
  • The above won't trigger a "redirect" by itself, so if you are not seeing a cached response then there must be _something else_ that is triggering this? – MrWhite Sep 29 '20 at 14:46

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