Ubuntu, Letsencrypt - Redirect from a non subdomain

Posted on August 31, 2017

We have a main website (main.com) and some subdomain (1.main.com) website for the same domain on one server all using HTTPS.

If you try and access the main domain using a subdomain not in use (2.main.com) it’ll take you to the last subdomain setup on the website (1.main.com) rather than the main website (main.com)

Is there a way to point the non setup subdomains to correctly redirect to the main website.

This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.

Andrew SB

February 6, 2018

It sounds like you have a wildcard DNS entry in place that directs any requests for *.main.com to the same IP address. In this case, Apache will route the request to the VirtualHost that matches. If no VirtualHost is an exact match, it will use the first one defined. So you’ll want to ensure that main.com is defined first:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName main.com
    DocumentRoot "/www/main.com"
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName 1.main.com
    DocumentRoot "/www/1.main.com"
</VirtualHost>

If you have the VirtualHosts in separate files, the order they are loaded will determine it. So use a filename like: 000-main.com.com to ensure it is loaded first.

For more info, see the Apache documentation and check out this tutorial: