I'm having an issue with getting a site set up in the web.config file for a Sitecore site. Specifically I can't figure how to use the hostName property to capture the "www" subdomain for a domain (e.g. www.mydomain.com) as well as no specified subdomain (e.g. mydomain.com).
I've experimented a little and found that I can do something like *.mydomain.com and it works. But the problem is that we want users to also be able to go to just mydomain.com and have the site come up. When I have the hostName configured as *.mydomain.com this apparently is not possible.
Any ideas? The Sitecore developer network doesn't say too much on this (unless it's hidden somewhere I couldn't find).
Craig
For a bit more precision than Mark's removing the dot (which will work) you can use pipe separation to list alternative names:
<site hostName="mydomain.com | *.mydomain.com" ... />
That would allow you to configure a second site reallymydomain.com without it being caught by the hostName above. Remember the sites list will be processed in order, so the first match counts even if there's a second match that is more specific.
Try no dot in the hostName:
<site hostName="*mydomain.com" ... />
Both Mark and James answers are correct and will help you resolve multiple domain/subdomain names to a single Sitecore site.
You may instead want to consider setting up a redirect in IIS from the non www domain to the www sub-domain or vice-versa. Having more than one definitive URL for your domain can negatively effect your page rank.
This is a handy module for IIS 7 to help you define redirects. http://www.iis.net/download/urlrewrite
Related
I have my non-www domain.com with GoDaddy and my WordPress Blog is hosted in AWS EC2. I'm using Route 53 to handle DNS requests. The existing solution for my question, seen in many places(including SOF) is to create two S3 buckets in the name of non-www domain and www domain for redirection of static websites. This is not my case.
I've my WordPress installed in EC2 and not using S3 for holding my Data. I hope this is not a static website and cannot follow the general solutions available.
I tried the following solution around and did not work
I tried changing the C-NAME record to www.domain.com but it did not worked.
I tried domain forward feature available with GoDaddy.com and didn't work.
I tried modifying .htaccess file and that too didn't work.
This is what my record sets in Route 53 look like
Name Type Value TTL
------ ----- ----- ----
domain.com. A xx.xx.xxx.xxx (EIP) 300
domain.com. MX 1 ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM 3600
5 ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM
5 ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM
10 ALT3.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM
10 ALT4.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM
domain.com. NS ns-27.awsdns-03.com. 172800
ns-1190.awsdns-20.org.
ns-2028.awsdns-61.co.uk.
ns-855.awsdns-42.net.
domain.com. SOA xxxxxxxxx 900
How can I redirect my domain.com to www.domain.com?
I was hesitant to post my comment as an answer because there are a gazillion ways to setup and configure Wordpress it seems. Anyway, to keep in the spirit of keeping this question in the amazon-web-services tag I ran a test case deploying from the AWS Wordpress Cloudformation template. I'm not sure if this is how you actually installed Wordpress but here is one way to redirect:
Make sure that your Cloudformation template completes successfully.
Here is what my Hosted Zone looked like - I have not added A records yet.
Get the instance IP address. Note that in this example I did not setup an Elastic IP. Since I knew that I would not need to stop the instance temporarily I opted to just stick with the automatically assigned, random pubic IP.
Next I made an A record for the domain apex of that IP and then an A record for www. I also changed the TTL to 60 seconds.
Once DNS propagation completed I tried accessing my domain name. As you can see, the AWS Cloudformation Wordpress installation defaults to a different path and URL.
Using the URL, http://example.com/wordpress did the trick.
I didn't go through the steps but when you go to http://example.com/wordpress it starts a setup screen. Enter all the information like DB name and password, etc. and then login to the admin panel. Once you go through all of that you go to the General settings screen. This is where your configuration will probably be different but for mine, the URLs were listed as http://example.com/wordpress. I simply changed these URLs to http://www.example.com/wordpress. (As an aside, I also tried changing and saving the permalink section to generate an .htaccess file but one was not generated due to the inability to write to the file. I tried making my own but I kept running into "too many redirect" messages so this might not be a route you want to take depending on your install.)
You will need to make a change in the index.php file. For my installation it was located at /var/www/html/wordpress/index.php. Make sure to make a copy before changing it. I simply added /wordpress/ in front of wp-blog-header.php. Again, this install puts the Wordpress files in the directory /wordpress - your install will probably be different.
Next you need to copy that modified index.php file to /var/www/html/ and then restart the httpd service.
To test the change I cleared out my DNS cache and opened up the network section of developer tools in Chrome.
I then opened a new tab (have to open developer tools again) and then typed in the naked domain name.
As you can see, the URL redirected to www.example.com with a 301 permanent redirect.
I'll through another suggestion out here while I'm at it. You can use the free version of Cloudflare to just do the redirect for you. Cloudflare offers a bunch of other free and useful services like CDN so if you don't mind depending on a 3rd party service (a reputable one by the way) it might be easier with more value add. As I highlighted in the screenshot however, note that if you use forwarding you cannot use some of the other advanced rule sets.
Anyway, I hope this helps!
In the Varnish Cache wiki it states an example of how to regsub to avoid caching request to www.example.com and example.com separately. The example from https://www.varnish-cache.org/trac/wiki/RedirectsAndRewrites is:
set req.http.host = regsub(req.http.host, "^www\.example\.com$","example.com");
"Requests to www.example.com and example.com will all go to the backend as "example.com" and end up cached by that string." This means duplicate caching does not occur.
I have multiple sites using the same varnish server (VCL) so am looking to replace "example.com" with a statement that will work on multiple URLs. eg:
www.example1.co.uk > example1.co.uk
www.example2.com > example2.com
What would be the appropriate regex (if that is the correct term) for this?
There are multiple separate domains (different sites with different content on different domains) using this VCL I am hoping to avoid having to alter the vcl when new sites are added/removed. Therefore a generic solution is what I am after, something that can be applied to any domain to remove the possibility of a duplicate with/without the WWW alias being store/served by Varnish. (Having trouble phrasing this, hope it is clearer!!)
I am aware that redirecting can be done outside of varnish, in Apache etc, but not looking for that as a solution.
set req.http.host = regsub(req.http.host,
"^www\.(.*)$",
"\1");
This will strip www off any domain. (I do feel reluctant to give you this answer, as it goes against my religion)
You might get penalized by search engines for serving the same content on multiple URLs, but SEO is a different topic.
Instead of what Chris suggested, you can just remove the www part:
set req.http.host = regsub(req.http.host, "^www\.", "");
Should be a teeny tiny bit faster, too
i have noticed one things , when some website are opened in any browser then in URL bar some are like
http://www.something.com
where some are like
http://something.com
here www is missing. Same things is happening with my blog url
if i write in URL bar as
http://www.shareprogrammingtips.com/
then it automatic converted in
http://shareprogrammingtips.com/
i am not getting why this happening ? is there any difference url with www and url without www ?
Edit:
one more thing i have notice is that url with www take longer time to open website then url without www takes..!
It does not matter if you have www in the URL or not, as long as you use the same URL always. This must be happening probably because your server is set-up to redirect the http://www.shareprogrammingtips.com/ to http://shareprogrammingtips.com/.
This will make sure that all the pages will always come to http://shareprogrammingtips.com/ and also search engines would index your site as http://shareprogrammingtips.com/. If your site is accessible from both http://www.shareprogrammingtips.com/ and http://shareprogrammingtips.com/ then the search engines would index both versions of your site, but the page rank of your site will be divided between these 2 versions as for search engines both these sites are different sites.
In the past, every URL required the www. prefix (i.e. www.hello.com). Nowadays we have naked domains which don't require this prefix (i.e. hello.com). We still have many domains with the www. prefix for legacy reasons.
When a company wants to buy a domain name, they can buy it either with or without the prefix, or get both (for example, buy the naked domain and set-up the same domain with the www. prefix as sub-domain) and configure both to load the same website. There are technical reasons to chosing a domain with a www. prefix (allows for certain cookie blocking polices) or a naked domain (shorter url).
Usually, one of the two will be the canonical (real) domain, while the other will only redirect to the real domain. This redirect causes a delay but it's there for a reason.
If you code this redirect the right way, search engines will understand that both are the same website. Otherwise if you skip the redirect and point both domains to your files directly, search engines will think they are separate websites which will hurt your SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
I have been having inconsistent behavior with my Django app.
If I login with no www, and then prepend www, it's not authenticated, and all the combinations thereof. (www.mydomain.com and mydomain.com like different sites in terms of auth)
If the authentication code is important, I wrote a middleware based on the tutorial here: http://onecreativeblog.com/post/59051248/django-login-required-middleware
So far I have fixed the issue forcing the appending of www, using PREPEND_WWW = True, but I would still like to understand the issue;)
Does anyone have an idea of what may be going on?
Thanks in advance!
What Zaha Zorg said: Cookies from Django won't work for both a prepended www and non-www domain by default.
However, the deeper issue here is that you're allowing both www and non-www domains of your site to serve identical content. Besides the obvious SEO consequences of having traffic split between the two, you run into issues like these. The proper way to handle this is to redirect all traffic from one to the other (whichever you prefer). The PREPEND_WWW setting you found works perfectly for this. For the opposite (forcing all traffic to non-www), it's recommended to just do a re-write at the server configuration level, such as Apache or Nginx.
You need to look at https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/settings/?from=olddocs#session-cookie-domain
SESSION_COOKIE_DOMAIN
Default: None
The domain to use for session cookies. Set this to a string such as ".lawrence.com" for cross-domain cookies, or use None for a standard domain cookie. See the How to use sessions.
Could it be that cookies depend on the hostname of the server ? This could explain why both domain names are considered different.
I have:
signed up for an AWS account
set up buckets for example.com and www.example.com
enabled website settings in properties for each domain
set bucket policies for both domains
created this cname record:
www > www.example.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com
Right now when a user goes to www.example.com, they see the index page, and everything is working just fine. When they go to example.com, there is nothing but darknenss and silence because the page just doesn't load (and gives 'connection timeout' error. )
What I want is for example.com to forward to www.example.com so that no matter what the user types in the browser, they see the site that is located at www.example.com.
How do I make this work?
Can I add a record of some kind at godaddy to make example.com redirect to www.example.com?
Do I have to get a static IP to make this work using s3? I keep reading about an elastic IP from EC2, but I am not understanding how I can set that up, or how it would work since I am not using EC2 at all for my website.
I think user Go Daddy's answer was correct, but I'll write up more succinct instructions that I followed to get the forwarding to work for me. I don't know why others are suggesting wwwizer, because GoDaddy uses a 301-redirect too (but maybe it didn't used to?). By the way, this answer isn't specific to Amazon's S3 -- it simply requires you have the "www" CNAME record set correctly.
Login to GoDaddy.com.
Click on My Account.
Click on the Domains product, and click the Launch button next to your domain.
In the Domain Information section you should see "Forwarding: Off". Click the Manage link next to it.
A Forwarding and Masking dialog box should come up. Under Forward example.COM to enter www.example.com.
Click the OK button.
The forwarding kicked in for me within maybe half an hour.
To note, in the dialog box you can change it to forward either "http://" or "https://". I only needed it for "http://", so I'm not sure if GoDaddy will forward both SLL and non-SSL at the same time.
Also, if you're curious, if you click on the Advanced Options link in the Forwarding and Masking dialog box, it should be defaulted to "Forward Only" and have the redirect type set to permanently forward your domain (which is what gives the 301-redirect).
You can use wwwizer's free naked domain redirect service:
http://wwwizer.com/naked-domain-redirect
Just put 174.129.25.170 as the A record for the non-www version of your domain.
fragholrok,
I'm glad you were able to find a way to get your site working. Admittedly, it's a little hard to understand exactly what's going on with your domain name without more specific info, but I wanted to jump in and mention one thing.
You weren't sure if you could forward your domain to the www subdomain. It depends how you have it setup - sometimes it will work and sometimes it won't. According to your original post, the www subdomain is setup with its own CNAME (as opposed to mirroring the main A Record). Because of this, you COULD forward your domain to the www subdomain - ie, forward domain.com to www.domain.com - using GoDaddy.com's domain forwarding functionality.
If, however, the CNAME for a subdomain is set to '#', which means it directs to the main A Record, forwarding the domain to the subdomain would not work.
I just wanted to clarify for anyone else who might come across this thread.
Good luck with your site,
Alon
GoDaddy.com Social Media
Sounds like your DNS/Name Servers on GoDaddy aren't set up right. They should have the information listed for the Nameservers somewhere where you're hosting the site.
EDIT: I've done some more looking around and it would Amazon doesn't provide you the Nameservers for S3. The "real solution" to this would be to set up a CName on GoDaddy. This site provides a lot of insight on doing that: http://www.google.com/support/blogger/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=58317
Also, this question seems to have come up before: Using GoDaddy Domain Hosting to link to Amazon S3 Website
I used the approach described in
http://thechrisoshow.com/2011/06/05/how-to-host-a-static-website-on-s3/
(also with godaddy).
It boils down to deleting the A host entry, creating a CNAME entry and using godaddy's forwarding functionality.
For me it is a partial solution. It works if I type
jaumebarcelo.info
in the url bar.
But it does not work if I click on a link pointing to
jaumebarcelo.info
or if I type
wget jaumebarcelo.info from the command line.
I am looking for the same answer. How I have done it in the past is with an apache htaccess rewrite. I may do it again this way.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]
Here is one such page that talks about it.
If you need more help I would google htaccess and apache rewrites.
If you are using Route 53, you can create a new bucket with your naked domain name, and under 'Static Website Hosting', set it to 'Redirect all requests to another host name'.
Update : Jul 2019
Since the original accepted answer by Michael Krebs in 2012, screens/ui might have changed little bit.
Please follow the screenshots below for the latest steps as of today:
Then click on add.
If no A record and www sub-domain is bound with subdomain it should redirect root domain to www sub-domain. This is how it works with many other sites.