.htaccess redirect using a page with no file extension

[krazyjoe]

i have tried a few way to do this but nothing has worked. What i want to do is re-direct people to a page on my site that has a rather long URL. I want to just have a simple url listed on an advertisement page that just has a one word url following the domain, like www.example.com/ad

I have used a PHP re-direct in the past but the page had an extension, when i re-named without the extension the page will not run the re-direct and just displays the page as raw text in the browser.

I tried to do the .htaccess redirect using the normal

Redirect /example.com/as http://example.com/12345789.html

but this is also not working at all and still just showing the raw text in the browser. I have the .htaccess file in the same level of the ftp server as the file page that has the re-direct, is this correct?

So in short i need to have my page with no file extension re-direct to another page when its typed directly in the browsers URL box.

[lucy24]

Why on earth do you want to redirect a short extensionless URL to a longer one with an extension? I strongly suspect you're missing a rewrite somewhere; I have to assume the physical files on your server have extensions.

Step one, then, is to take ALL rules that currently use mod_alias (Redirect by that name) and convert them to mod_rewrite syntax, because everything needs to be in the same form. Come back when you've done that part.

Next step will have two parts:
redirect from old with-extension URL to new without-extension form
and
rewrite new extensionless URL to serve content from wherever it happens to live.

Happily there are at least 80,000 threads in this subforum addressing the question.

[phranque]

welcome to WebmasterWorld, krazyjoe!


the key to what lucy24 said is that you first need to understand what an internal rewrite is vs. an external redirect.

Redirect /example.com/as http://example.com/12345789.html

since you probably want an internal rewrite for this rule, the Redirect (a mod_aliaS directive) is wrong for this purpose.
in addition, the Redirect directive looks at path information only and you can't examine the hostname unless you use mod_rewrite directives (RewriteCond).

[krazyjoe]

Thanks for the replies. I only recently switched over to a Linux based server running Apache so this is all completely new.

I guess two start should i be using .htaccess or should i just use code in the page that is going to be doing the re-directing. The reason im doing this is because im creating an add for people to come to our e-commerce web site. The e-com site generates pages and the code so i don't really have control over the urls and it make them very long. This is why i want to just have a simple word after my domain name so its easy to type in and also remember. This is why i want them page to not require an extension like .html or .php. Just again to simplify things.

[g1smd]

Effectively you want a "short URL" to advertise elsewhere.

In this case, a redirect using RewriteRule and [R=301,L] seems appropriate.

[lucy24]

should i be using .htaccess or should i just use code in the page

If those are your two choices, go with htaccess. In-page redirects are generally a last resort.