if you wish to force the use of www instead of non-www

Apache HTTP

[whaines]

#running on port 80

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

or this correct

#running on port 80

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

Thank You,
whaines

[incrediBILL]

Did you try them?

Did they work?

[lucy24]

or this correct

Neither. You need a single RewriteCond that says (in English) "if the requested host is NOT" exactly what you want it to be. There are many possible incorrect requests, and only one correct one.

This is one of the Top 20 questions-- at least-- in the Apache forum. Forums search should bring up several thousand earlier threads showing the exact punctuation needed.

Did they work?

Well, that's one question to ask. There are others ;)

[g1smd]

It's only a matter of days since someone presented a list of two or three options for www/non-www canonicalisation and asked which one was correct.

That thread has a whole bunch of useful information along with code with less issues.

The code with ^/ is intended for httpd.conf.

The second one is intended for use in htaccess.

Both have a significant list of issues that make them non-optimum.