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I've referenced this question but I'm not sure if I'm clear on how this works given this situation:

I have a client with two brands that are currently online like this:

Brand A (site 1)    Brand B (site 2)
---                 ---  
site 1 pages        site 2 pages

Now, they've had a new site built that combines content from both sites and unifies their two brands into one:

Brand Unified (site 3)
---
site 3 pages

Clearly there are 301 redirects I want to put into place for each original site after I update the A records for each domain. However, the new site is a custom WordPress theme and WP only allows for one domain per installation. This leaves me with a situation where I can assign the original TLD from, say, Brand A as the site URL in WordPress, and then have the Brand B domain redirect to A.

I thought I would use a server block like this in the Apache site conf:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName site1.com  #site1.com now points directly here
    ServerAlias site2.com #site2.com points directly but redirects
    ServerAdmin admin@brandAsite.com
    DocumentRoot /var/www/newsite

So, assuming there is nothing wrong with this configuration, what happens if I try to implement 301 redirects for site1 and site2 links? Specifically, since site2.com is now listed as an alias of site1.com, can I still effectively have 301 redirects in the .htaccess file in the /var/www/newsite/ directory or does ServerAlias interfere with that? I'm wondering if it gets aliased to back to site1.com and therefore the 301 rules wouldn't trigger?

Community
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armadadrive
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1 Answers1

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If you are able to configure Apache conf, why complicate situation and put redirects (or anything) in .htaccess files? You seem to assign site2.com to /var/www/newsite only for the purpose to using .htaccess and nothing else. I would keep it simple, everything in one place:

NameVirtualHost  *:80
<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName site1.com
    DocumentRoot /var/www/newsite
</VirtualHost>
<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName site2.com

    # Specifically mapped redirects
    Redirect permanent /foo/ http://site1.com/new-foo/

    # Root redirect (if no other cases above match)
    Redirect permanent /  http://site1.com/
</VirtualHost>
kubanczyk
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  • The URL structure on the new site is different than the old site - doesn't this solution throw away the ability to do specific mapping of old URLs to new ones? – armadadrive Dec 29 '16 at 13:37
  • I didn't catch the requirement "to do specific mapping of old URLs to new ones". My answer doesn't fulfill it. – kubanczyk Dec 29 '16 at 13:56
  • Feel free to update if you do know the answer! Thanks for taking the time in the first place. – armadadrive Dec 29 '16 at 14:01
  • Can I place all of my 301s in that second block? Or does the forwarding of `/` trump them all and simply redirect any traffic from the old domain to the new one? – armadadrive Dec 29 '16 at 19:17
  • @armadadrive I believe you can put specific redirects before the general `/` one. – kubanczyk Dec 29 '16 at 23:09
  • `Redirect permanent / http://example.com/` **Trailing slash are required**, otherwise `http://oldsite.example.com/asdf` redirects to `http://example.comasdf` – Sanya_Zol Mar 22 '18 at 06:28