RewriteCond and RewriteRule work fine except when not using paths

Question

I have a new domain, that needs to load the contents of an old domain via Proxy in Apache. This is already working fine:

<VirtualHost myserver:80>
ServerName newdomain.com
ServerAlias www.newdomain.com
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^newdomain\.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://olddomain.com/$1 [P]
</VirtualHost>

For example:

• newdomain.com/contact loads olddomain.com/contact
• newdomain.com/catalogue/342 loads olddomain.com/catalogue/342

But the problem comes when I try this:

• newdomain.com (without any additional paths). The result is a 404 error.

I pretty much guess that the issue is in the RewriteCond / RewriteRule definitions, but I can't seem to find the problem. Any ideas? Thanks!

Answer 1

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://olddomain.com/$1 [P]

Because this rule is defined in a virtualhost context, the URL-path that the RewriteRule pattern matches against is root-relative and starts with a slash. Since this is captured and used in the substitution string it will result in a double slash at the start of the target URL-path.

Maybe this is throwing off the routing for the homepage.

Try the following instead:

RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ https://olddomain.com/$1 [P]

There's also no need for the preceding RewriteCond directive since you are already in the vHost for newdomain.com and the current condition omits www.newdomain.com, which is presumably not the intention.

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Or don't use mod_rewrite at all, since it would seem to be a direct one-to-one proxy.

For example, use the following instead.

ProxyPass / https://olddomain.com/
ProxyPassReverse / https://olddomain.com/