Redirecting a URL

Question

I'm facing the following challenge:

I am setting up a homepage for our science department using OpenScholar, which is based on Drupal 6. From what I understand, it uses vsites so that many users can create personalized homepages on one OpenScholar installation.

I have set up OpenScholar on my server in the directory /var/www/example.com and it is served using a name-based VirtualHost on Apache2 that replies to the URL "example.com" ("example.com" is just a space holder).

When I created the homepage for my institute it is created at "example.com/example". The problem I am facing now is that I would like anyone calling "example.com" in their browser to end up at "example.com/example" without them even seeing "example.com/example" in their browser, in order to make the vsite my main site for "example.com". But I am not sure how to achieve this.

I have tried using Apache redirects/rewrites and also using the module "path redirect" and "global redirect" in Drupal, but it didn't work.

I would love to hear from someone on how this can be achieved.

------ EDIT ------

The answer by Tom Kirkpatrick did help, but I ran into a new problem. Here the setting I used:

  RewriteRule ^$ example/
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
#  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ example/$1

I commented the last line due to the following: When I call example.com, I end up with example.com/example shown as example.com. But I have the problem that internal calls to page such as example.com/example/subpage is not changed to example.com/subpage. So if you continue browsing from example.com to a subpage in the browser you end up seeing example.com/example/subpage and not example.com/subpage, since that is the internal path that Drupal uses. That is also why I needed to comment the last line as this would rewrite example.com/example/subpage to example.com/example/example/subpage which does not exist. Or so I assume, because with it, it is not working. So is there some way to rewrite the path that the user sees in his browser from example.com/example/subpage (the internal path used by Drupal) to example.com/subpage without having to mess with the Drupal settings itself? I.e. to do it completely inside Apache? Thanks again!

Answer 1

So If I understand you correctly, you want to be able to access the site that is currently at http://www.example.com/example, by a simpler http://www.example.com

Create a .htaccess file in the webroot with the following:

Options -Indexes
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^$ example/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ example/$1

Then, update your settings.php file to have the $base_url defined as: $base_url = 'http://example.com';

Answer 2

As I understand the question, the user is having a problem with removing a subdomain from the url. He's in need of a way to redirect any request to a subdomain site to a standard url. The following technique may help, as it provides a way to redefine the base url, based on an element appearing in the url structure. (Know that with Drupal, the base url is position -1, the first element after the base url is position 0, etc. So that if you want to set a condition to check for an element in position 0 of the url [www.base.com/position_0], as the code below does, you would write it to check for $path[0].

One of our Drupal 7 websites we maintain but did not develop has some code in the html.tpl.php that redirects pages with certain elements in the url position 0 to an alternate base url. I don't fully understand it but it's nice to know. Not sure if it's applicable to Drupal 6. Hope it helps somebody who needs a handy redirect method.

global $base_url;
$href = $base_url;
$path = drupal_get_path_alias($_GET['q']);
if ($path[0] == 'awards' OR strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'], 'awards') !== false) {
$head_title = $title . ' | Alternatesite.info';
$href = "http://www.alternate_site.info/";
$is_alternate_site = true;
}
else {
$href = $base_url;
$is_alternate_site = false;
}