Apache subpath rewrites

To have a more linear structure in my blog I changed the subpath of posts which are now under /post/ instead of /notes/.

The problem is that external websites which link pages of my blog (backlinks) do not know about this change, so to avoid dead URLs I needed to redirect requests from /notes/\*.html to /post/\*.html.

These instructions work for the Apache HTTPD server

1. login as root

2. enable the rewrite module

   a2enmod rewrite
   

3. in your virtual host enable the FollowSymLinks option

4. the rewrite rule I use is like this

   RewriteRule ^notes/(.*\.html)$ https://blog.franco.net.eu.org/post/$1 [R,L]
   

   • notice the round brackets in (.*\.html): those are required
   • $1 correponds to the matched part in the source URL
   • [R,L] mean
     • R: apply external redirect
     • L: stop the rewriting rule after the current rule

Example #

Here is the full example of a virtual host

<VirtualHost *:443>

    # [ ... ]

    RewriteEngine on
    ServerName blog.franco.net.eu.org

    DocumentRoot "/var/www/blog.franco.net.eu.org"
    <Directory "/var/www/blog.franco.net.eu.org">
        Options -ExecCGI -Includes
        Options FollowSymLinks
        # No indexing.
        Options -Indexes

        #
        # AllowOverride controls what directives may be placed in .htaccess files.
        # It can be "All", "None", or any combination of the keywords:
        #   AllowOverride FileInfo AuthConfig Limit
        #
        AllowOverride None

        #
        # Controls who can get stuff from this server.
        #
        Require all granted

        RewriteRule ^notes/(.*\.html)$ https://blog.franco.net.eu.org/post/$1 [R,L]
    </Directory>

    # [ ... ]

</VirtualHost>