invisible mod_rewrite is not always invisible!? (“www” and “without subdomain”)

Question

My site is on a host using cPanel 11.

Unfortunatly it redirects both \"www.e-motiv.net\" and \"e-motiv.net\" to public_html. I want resp. public_htm

Answer 1

This is because of mod_dir. mod_dir adds the tailing slashed to urls that map to directories. mod_dir is not aware of these 'virtual urls' created with mod_rewrite.

So either disable this behavior by using

DirectorySlash Off

This will however make requests to www.example.com/folder result in a 404 not found. You can fix this with some rewriterule though. So the complete solution would be something like:

DirectorySlash Off
#www dir only
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/$0 -d
RewriteRule ^www/(.+[^/])$ /$1/ [R,L]
#other dirs
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/$0 -d
RewriteRule ^(.+[^/])$ /$1/ [R,L]