Want to redirect my site all pages to /blog

Question

For example my site: www.example.com

When anyone visits my site, I want them all to redirect to www.example.com/blog

But when I open my site it should not redirect me to blog, it should work normally. So how can I achieve the above using .htaccess?

I am going to apply the following code to redirect all pages to blog:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} old\www.example.com$
RewriteRule .* http://www.example.com/blog? [L,R=301]

But how can I specify my IP address in above so I can access all pages and no redirects.

Answer 1

To redirect everyone else, apart from your IP address (eg. 123.123.123.123), to the /blog subdirectory then you can use something like the following in .htaccess:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/blog/
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !=123.123.123.123
RewriteRule (.*) /blog/$1 [R=301,L]

If the requested URI does not start with /blog/ and the IP address is not 123.123.123.123 then redirect to include /blog/ at the start.

The $1 in the RewriteRule substitution is a backreference to the parenthesised pattern (.*) in the RewriteRule pattern (ie. the entire URL less the slash prefix - in htaccess).

Note also that I've removed the ? at the end of the RewriteRule substitution. This specifically removes any query string from the request. Unless that is required, it should be omitted.

I don't see any reason to test against %{HTTP_HOST} (as in your original example). (?)

---

My initial answer (below) is not what you require, but I'll leave it for completeness.

This version internally rewrites (as opposed to redirecting) all requests to the /blog subdirectory (the URL in the address bar does not change).

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/blog/
RewriteRule (.*) /blog/$1 [L]

This basically says... if the requested URI does not start with /blog/ then rewrite to include /blog/ at the start. Note the absence of the R flag on the RewriteRule directive. The R flag would result in an external redirect.