Permanent Redirect (WWW to non WWW)

Question

This is my vhost conf and still permanent redirect isn't working.

DocumentRoot /var/www/example
ServerName example.com
ServerAlias www.example.com
<Directory "/var/www/example">
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
allow from all
</Directory>
RedirectPermanent http://www.example.com http://example.com

Answer 1

The first parameter of RedirectPermanent should be a path, not a full URL (e.g. RedirectPermanent /foo http://example.com/bar), so you won't quite be able to get what you're trying to do to work.

You should be able to do it if you split the www part into a separate vhost:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    DocumentRoot /var/www/example
    ServerName example.com
    <Directory "/var/www/example">
        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
        AllowOverride All
        Order allow,deny
        allow from all
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *:80>
    DocumentRoot /var/www/example
    ServerName www.example.com
    RedirectPermanent / http://example.com
</VirtualHost>

However, this will only redirect the homepage. If you want to redirect all www.example.com requests you'll want to use mod_rewrite as in closetnoc's example. You don't have to use htaccess files - those directives are perfectly valid in the directory block of a vhost:

ServerName example.com
ServerAlias www.example.com
<Directory "/var/www/example">
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
    AllowOverride All
    Order allow,deny
    allow from all

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

Also, if you are concerned about the performance of .htaccess files (which is negligible, but it exists), you probably don't want to use AllowOverride All, since that's what tells Apache to look for them.

Answer 2

I never try and do redirects on the configuration file.

I would suggest removing your redirect and creating an .htaccess file within the root of the web space with the following code:

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