How to make www work and redirect to non www

March 5, 2014 6.6k views
dustinmatlock
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dustinmatlock
I was curious the best way to forward www.mysite.tips to the non www version. It seems right now www does not work at all on my site. Thanks
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4 Answers
fraggalen March 5, 2014
Interesting that you posted this as I am having the same exact problem. I can't access my site via www. prefix, but without it I can.
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dustinmatlock March 5, 2014
What you do is add your domain without the "www" and then create an A record with www as the hostname and then your IP address.

If you want to redirect www to without www use this code:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.example.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Or vice versa:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com$1 [R=301]

Here's a screenshot of the DNS records: http://cl.ly/UGcn
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FMCB March 5, 2014
did you solve your issue?

you didn't mention yet what web server you are using because each one has different way of redirecting...

seems like you use Aapache!!
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avaldez March 28, 2015

Although the other answer is not wrong (I didn't test it), I think that is a bit harder to understand. Instead of writing it there, do it in your apache virtual hosts (mine is in /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf).

The top one has all your default stuffs:
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName example.com
DocumentRoot ...
#More stuff
</VirtualHost>

All your other urls that need to be resolved and redirected.
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName www.example.com
Redirect permanent / http://example.com
</VirtualHost>

I placed it all in the same file since all it does is redirect. Make sure you add one to also resolve your IP. Hope this is helpful since its the second search result on google.

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