Redirect/Rewrite Subdomain to Subfolder

Question

I'm trying to redirect a subdomain to a subfolder e.g. forums.domain.com to www.domain.com/forums

Note that I started the forums in the subfolder format but worried that members might mistakenly try to access the forums using the subdomain format.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?forums\.domain\.com
RewriteRule .* /forums [L]

From what I read the codes above should work through .htaccess, but do I still need to create a DNS A record to point to the IP address of the server?

Answer 1

Try this:

Options +FollowSymLinks 
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(www)\. [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(.*)\.domain\.com [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.domain.com/%1 [R=301,L]

This is generic and will redirect all subdomains to a subdirectory. If you have only one subdomain you want to redirect you can hardcode it in.

Answer 2

@John: I've been searching for months on how to do this successfully. So far your snippet of code is the only one that has worked on my WP subfolder multisite install. I think it might have something to do with the "+FollowSymLinks" line.

What I wanted to do was take xyz.domain.com and redirect to domain.com/xyz. That works with the above code. But I'd like abc.domain.com to redirect to domain.com/xyz as well (i.e., two subdomains pointing to the same subfolder). How exactly do I do that? Despite my layman's attempts to "reverse engineer" or adapt your code, I don't understand how to hardcode these.