How do I use a htaccess redirect to force www and use the .org domain while maintaining the URL path?

Question

I have found this rule that does about 90% of what I want, but not quite everything. My main goals for the redirect are to 1) force www. 2) redirect .com to .org. This does that, but if I were at www.domain.com/page, it just redirects to the home page and not www.domain.org/page. How can I get it to do this last step as well?

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.domain.org$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.org/ [L,R=301]

Answer 1

You will want to use your .htaccess file in the root of each site. You will be creating 2 .htaccess files, one per-site. I am assuming that you have each site defined within Apache as two separate sites. This is important to do.

In your .com site:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.org/$1 [L,R=301]

In your .org site:

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

This will do two things:

• Do a blanket redirect from your .com site to your .org site.
• Redirect any non-www request to www preserving the original request.

Answer 2

That should be:

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

The "$1" tells mod_rewrite to add the matched text from inside the parentheses in the pattern to the rewritten URL, which is what you want.