Redirecting www URL requests to non-www URL (and vice-versa) in Rails 3

Vikrant Chaudhary | February 08, 2011 | Tagged rails, rails-3

It is probably not a good idea to have your website reachable from both “www.” URL as well as “non-www” top-level URL. As this diverts traffic (and bookmarks) to two different URIs while also possibly splitting up search-engine’s page-ranking. While “www.” URLs have their own advantages (e.g., familiarity, cookie-less sibling subdomain), non-www URLs take at least one less DNS query to resolve and are shorter.

Here is how to achieve the redirection in Rails 3:

  # config/routes.rb
  constraints(:host => "www.example.net") do
    # Won't match root path without brackets around "*x". (using Rails 3.0.3)
    match "(*x)" => redirect { |params, request|
      URI.parse(request.url).tap { |x| x.host = "example.net" }.to_s
    }
  end

And the reverse i.e., redirecting “without-www” to “www”:

  # config/routes.rb
  constraints(:host => "example.net") do
    match "(*x)" => redirect { |params, request|
      URI.parse(request.url).tap { |x| x.host = "www.example.net" }.to_s
    }
  end

4 responses to "Blog | Redirecting www URL requests to non-www URL (and vice-versa) in Rails 3"

http://inst.myopenid.com/ says at February 16, 2012 at 5:04 PM
Does it works on last versions of Rails?

Could it be modified to be domain agnostic?

Not Entered says at October 10, 2012 at 4:22 PM

Hi,
It works on the last 3.x version of rails.

Also it can be domain agnostic. Here is domain agnostic version for this:

  # config/routes.rb
  constraints(subdomain: '') do
    match "(*x)" => redirect do |params, request|
      URI.parse(request.url).tap { |x| x.host = "www.#{x.host}" }.to_s
    end
  end

Not Entered says at October 10, 2012 at 4:24 PM

oops: little mistake

here it is:

Hi,
It works on the last 3.x version of rails.

Also it can be domain agnostic. Here is domain agnostic version for this:

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  # config/routes.rb
  constraints(subdomain: '') do
    match "(*x)" => redirect { |params, request|
      URI.parse(request.url).tap { |x| x.host = "www.#{x.host}" }.to_s
    }
  end

Not Entered says at October 10, 2012 at 4:25 PM
Hate when I can't edit my posts :) :)

Redirecting www URL requests to non-www URL (and vice-versa) in Rails 3

4 responses to "Blog | Redirecting www URL requests to non-www URL (and vice-versa) in Rails 3"

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