Apache Redirect Wildcard sub- subdomain to subdomain

Question

I am currently working on an application which was build to work with wildcard subdomains.

For Example:

customer1.domain.com
customer2.domain.com

So we bought a wildcard SSL Certificate for *.domain.com and redirected all subdomains from http to https.

So far, so easy, but now we have customers that manually type www.customer1.domain.com in their browser, for this exists no vhost.

What i want to do now is, redirect all request from http://www.wildcard.domain.com to https://wildcard.domain.com

Our vhost looks like:

<VirtualHost {{IP-ADRR}}:443>
  Servername %1.domain.com
  VirtualDocumentRoot /path/to/webroot/%0
  Include  /etc/httpd/conf/options-ssl-standard.conf
</VirtualHost>

Our Redirect for all HTTP Request to same target on HTTPS looks like:

<Virtualhost {{IP-ADRR}}:80>
  ServerName %1.domain.com
  RewriteEngine On
  RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}$1 [R=301,L]
</VirtualHost>

What if the user goes to http**s**://www.wildcard.domain.com? Does your solution below work? — jeff-h, Jan 25 '18 at 07:06

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 05 '17 at 08:33

The solution for the redirect is:

<Virtualhost {{IP-ADRR}}:80>
  ServerName %1.domain.com
  RewriteEngine On
  RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off [OR]
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\. [NC]
  RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(?:www\.)?(.+)$ [NC]
  RewriteRule ^ https://%1%{REQUEST_URI} [L,NE,R=301]
</VirtualHost>

Explanation:

RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\. [NC]

These two lines are are the redirect conditions, they are used to determine if the request should be redirected. Because the conditions are joined with an [OR], if any of those two conditions returns true, Apache will execute the rewrite rule (the redirect).

The first condition determines if the request is using a non-HTTPS URL. The second condition determines if the request is using the www URL. Notice that I used www\. and not www., because the pattern is a regular expression and the . dot has a special meaning here, hence it must be escaped.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(?:www\.)?(.+)$ [NC]

The forth line is a convenient line I used to avoid referending the hostname directly in the URL. It matches the HOST of the incoming request, and decomposes it into www part (if any), and rest of the hostname. We'll reference it later with %1 in the RewriteRule.

RewriteRule ^ https://www.%1%{REQUEST_URI} [L,NE,R=301]

The RewriteRule is the heart of the redirect. With this line we tell Apache to redirect any request to a new URL, composed by:

https://www.
%1: the reference to the non-www part of the host
%{REQUEST_URI}: the URI of the request, without the hostname

All these tokens are joined together, and represents the final redirect URI. Finally, we append 3 flags:

NE to not escape special characters
R=301 to use the HTTP 301 redirect status
L to stop processing other rules, and redirect immediately

You shouldn't need `RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off [OR]` for a vhost listening on port 80. Port 80 is for unencrypted HTTP, and a user who types `https://www.example.com:80/` is never going to complete the HTTPS handshake with the server, so the rewriting won't take effect anyway. — Ben Stern, Jul 08 '18 at 05:48

Apache Redirect Wildcard sub- subdomain to subdomain

1 Answers1