Apache, Redirect is not working for substring

Question

Issue

In apache, how can I redirect to homepage in case if you will go to exact string, but everything behind this string should be displayed normally, no redirect.

Example.

http://example.com/STRING -> go to homepage
http://example.com/STRING_PAGE -> go to http://example.com/STRING_PAGE

I tried

Redirect 301 /STRING http://example.com/

But in this case page is redirected to homepage too, for example in case of http://example.com/STRING_PAGE.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Redirect 301 /STRING http://example.com/

The mod_alias Redirect directive is prefix-matching, so the above will match requests for both /STRING and /STRING_PAGE.

You need to use RedirectMatch (also part of mod_alias) if you want an exact match - this uses regular expressions to match against the requested URL.

For example, to match /STRING only then try the following instead:

RedirectMatch 301 ^/STRING$ http://example.com/

(You will need to clear your browser cache before testing.)

However, if you are already using mod_rewrite (ie. RewriteRule) for other rewrites/redirects then you may need to use mod_rewrite instead in order to avoid conflicts. For example, the equivalent using mod_rewrite would be:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteRule ^/?STRING$ http://example.com/ [R=301,L]