301 Redirect from www to non-www without using VHOST

Question

I have my web application running on EC2 with Apache. I want to redirect www to non-www. On searching Google, I used this but it leads to redirect loop:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName www.domain.com
    Redirect 301 / http://domain.com/
</VirtualHost>

I am not using virtual hosts as the server only handles one domain. What can be wrong in above example and How can I do 301 redirect?

P.S. I am trying to avoid using .htaccess.

Answer 1

You have to question some confusion, so I'll talk about ways to do a redirect from www to no-www:

1.Create two VirtualHost for two domains and use 301 redirect:

NameVirtualHost *:80
<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName example.com
    DocumentRoot "/path/to/site"
</VirtualHost>
<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName www.example.com
    Redirect 301 / http://example.com/
</VirtualHost>

2.Create two VirtualHost for two domains and use .htaccess with redirect-rule:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName example.com
    DocumentRoot "/path/to/site1"
</VirtualHost>
<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName www.example.com
    DocumentRoot "/path/to/site2"
</VirtualHost>

and create /path/to/site2/.htaccess with

Redirect 301 / http://example.com/

3.Create 1 VirtualHost and set redirect in common .htaccess:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName example.com
    ServerAlias www.example.com
    DocumentRoot "/path/to/site"
</VirtualHost>

create /path/to/site/.htaccess with

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