Redirecting and Remapping with mod_rewrite

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This document supplements the mod_rewrite reference documentation. It describes how you can use mod_rewrite to redirect and remap request. This includes many examples of common uses of mod_rewrite, including detailed descriptions of how each works.

Note that many of these examples won't work unchanged in your particular server configuration, so it's important that you understand them, rather than merely cutting and pasting the examples into your configuration.

From Old to New (internal)

Description:

Assume we have recently renamed the page foo.html to bar.html and now want to provide the old URL for backward compatibility. However, we want that users of the old URL even not recognize that the pages was renamed - that is, we don't want the address to change in their browser.

Solution:

We rewrite the old URL to the new one internally via the following rule:

RewriteEngine  on
RewriteRule    "^/foo\.html$"  "/bar.html" [PT]

Rewriting From Old to New (external)

Description:

Assume again that we have recently renamed the page foo.html to bar.html and now want to provide the old URL for backward compatibility. But this time we want that the users of the old URL get hinted to the new one, i.e. their browsers Location field should change, too.

Solution:

We force a HTTP redirect to the new URL which leads to a change of the browsers and thus the users view:

RewriteEngine  on
RewriteRule    "^/foo\.html$"  "bar.html"  [R]

Discussion

In this example, as contrasted to the internal example above, we can simply use the Redirect directive. mod_rewrite was used in that earlier example in order to hide the redirect from the client:

Redirect "/foo.html" "/bar.html"

Resource Moved to Another Server

Description:

If a resource has moved to another server, you may wish to have URLs continue to work for a time on the old server while people update their bookmarks.

Solution:

You can use mod_rewrite to redirect these URLs to the new server, but you might also consider using the Redirect or RedirectMatch directive.

#With mod_rewrite
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule   "^/docs/(.+)"  "http://new.example.com/docs/$1"  [R,L]

#With RedirectMatch
RedirectMatch "^/docs/(.*)" "http://new.example.com/docs/$1"

#With Redirect
Redirect "/docs/" "http://new.example.com/docs/"

From Static to Dynamic

Description:

How can we transform a static page foo.html into a dynamic variant foo.cgi in a seamless way, i.e. without notice by the browser/user.

Solution:

We just rewrite the URL to the CGI-script and force the handler to be cgi-script so that it is executed as a CGI program. This way a request to /~quux/foo.html internally leads to the invocation of /~quux/foo.cgi.

RewriteEngine  on
RewriteBase    "/~quux/"
RewriteRule    "^foo\.html$"  "foo.cgi"  [H=cgi-script]

Redirecting and Remapping with mod_rewrite

See also

From Old to New (internal)

Rewriting From Old to New (external)

Resource Moved to Another Server

From Static to Dynamic