Name

RedirectMatch

Synopsis

RedirectMatch regex url
Server config, virtual host, directory, .htaccess

Again, RedirectMatch works like Redirect, except that it takes a regular expression (discussed earlier under ScriptAliasMatch) as its first argument.

In the Butterthlies business, sad to relate, the salespeople have been abusing their powers and perquisites, and it has been decided to teach them a lesson by hiding their beloved secrets file and sending them to the ordinary customers’ site when they try to access it. How humiliating! Easily done, though.

The Config file is httpd3.conf :

...
<VirtualHost sales.butterthlies.com>
ServerAdmin sales_mgr@butterthlies.com
Redirect /secrets http://www.butterthlies.com
DocumentRoot /usr/www/APACHE3/site.alias/htdocs/salesmen
...

The exact placing of the Redirect doesn’t matter, as long as it is somewhere in the <VirtualHost> section. If you now access http://sales.butterthlies.com/secrets, you are shunted straight to the customers’ index at http://www.butterthlies.com /.

It is somewhat puzzling that if the Redirect line fails to work because you have misspelled the URL, there may be nothing in the error_log because the browser is vainly trying to find it out on the Web.

An important difference between Alias and Redirect is that the browser becomes aware of the new location in a Redirect, but not in an Alias, and this new location will be used as the basis for relative hot links found in the retrieved HTML.