9 Jul
2022
9 Jul
'22
10:31 a.m.
Hi all,
I’ve been banging my head against this issue for a couple of weeks and I’m hoping someone
here can provide some guidance or sugestions.
Some Background
I run several WordPress sites on my Bitfolk VPS, and I have AWS CloudFront in front of
them. Because CloudFront serves the www.domain.name<http://www.domain.name> URLs, I
have origin-www.domain.name DNS entries pointing to my VPS, and Apache VirtualHosts
configured that respond to multiple ServerNames and ServerAliases:
* domain.name
* origin-www.domain.name
* www.domain.name
* www-test.domain.name
On the VPS I am serving the websites over HTTP and HTTPS (using Let’s Encrypt for
certificates), but CloudFront is configured to redirect HTTP requests to HTTPS (using AWS
Certificate Manager certificates), and to only communicate with the origin over HTTPS. The
Apache VirtualHosts are configured to redirect any domain name to https://www.domain.name,
which is the URL that each WordPress site is configured to use (for the WordPress Address
and the Site Address).
Now to the problem
I see different behaviours with the redirects on different websites. For example, if I
test all the URI combinations for one of my sites using a site like
https://httpstatus.io/, I get:
1. http://wofeckcsclub.co.uk --> https://wofeckcsclub.co.uk -->
https://www.wofeckcsclub.co.uk --> website loads
2. http://origin-www.wofeckcsclub.co.uk --> https://www.wofeckcsclub.co.uk -->
website loads
3. http://www.wofeckcsclub.co.uk --> https://www.wofeckcsclub.co.uk --> website
loads
4. http://www-test.wofeckcsclub.co.uk --> https://www-test.wofeckcsclub.co.uk -->
https://www.wofeckcsclub.co.uk --> website loads
5. https://wofeckcsclub.co.uk --> https://www.wofeckcsclub.co.uk --> website
loads
6. https://origin-www.wofeckcsclub.co.uk --> https://www.wofeckcsclub.co.uk -->
website loads
7. https://www.wofeckcsclub.co.uk --> website loads
8. https://www-test.wofeckcsclub.co.uk --> https://www.wofeckcsclub.co.uk -->
website loads
On the whole, this is fine. I’d rather 1) and 4) had a single redirect to
https://www.wofeckcsclub.co.uk but I think this is a result of CloudFront first
redirecting to HTTPS and then the HTTPS site redirecting to the correct URI, so not sure I
can do much about this (except maybe enable CloudFront to communicate with the origin via
HTTP, and allow the HTTP origin site to redirect to the correct URI).
However, a few of my websites do this instead:
1. http://savouredescapes.com --> https://savouredescapes.com -->
https://www.savouredescapes.com --> website loads
2. http://origin-www.savouredescapes.com --> https://www.savouredescapes.com -->
website loads
3. http://www.savouredescapes.com --> https://www.savouredescapes.com --> website
loads
4. http://www-test.savouredescapes.com --> https://www.savouredescapes.com -->
website loads
5. https://savouredescapes.com --> https://www.savouredescapes.com --> website
loads
6. https://origin-www.savouredescapes.com --> website loads [not correct]
7. https://www.savouredescapes.com --> website loads
8. https://www-test.savouredescapes.com --> website loads [not correct]
For these websites, URIs 6) and 8) are not being redirected, and display the website with
the original URI in the browser. All the VirtualHosts are configured the same, and look
like this:
<VirtualHost *:80>
DocumentRoot /var/www/savouredescapes
ServerName www.savouredescapes.com
ServerAlias savouredescapes.com origin-www.savouredescapes.com
www-test.savouredescapes.com
<Directory /var/www/savouredescapes/>
AllowOverride All
</Directory>
ErrorDocument 403 /error/noindex.html
ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/savouredescapes-error.log
CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/savouredescapes-access.log combined
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{SERVER_NAME} =savouredescapes.com [OR]
RewriteCond %{SERVER_NAME} =origin-www.savouredescapes.com [OR]
RewriteCond %{SERVER_NAME} =www.savouredescapes.com [OR]
RewriteCond %{SERVER_NAME} =www-test.savouredescapes.com
RewriteRule ^ https://www.savouredescapes.com%{REQUEST_URI} [END,NE,R=permanent]
</VirtualHost>
As far as I can tell, a URI like https://origin-www.savouredescapes.com should be hitting
my VPS direct (no CloudFront, DNS points to my VPS) and getting redirected to
https://www.savouredescapes.com, which should then be served via CloudFront. However,
Apache doesn’t seem to be performing this redirect. In the Apache logs, I see entries like
this in the ‘access’ log:
188.166.109.207 - - [09/Jul/2022:11:19:04 +0100] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 58957
"-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:102.0) Gecko/20100101
Firefox/102.0"
As opposed to something like this when the redirect does work:
188.166.109.207 - - [09/Jul/2022:11:11:18 +0100] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 301 568
"-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:102.0) Gecko/20100101
Firefox/102.0"
And nothing in the error logs. So I’m not sure how to troubleshoot further why the
redirects aren’t working as expected for this particular website.
In addition, because this does work on some of my other sites (like the
https://www.wofeckcsclub.co.uk site I first showed the results for), I presume WordPress
(or something else?!?) must be doing an internal redirect, rather than Apache? Again, as
far as I can tell the WordPress configurations are the same; there are no obvious plugins
that would configure 301/302 redirects on the WordPress instances that do work, although
that’s not to say such a plugin hasn’t been installed and configured in the past and since
removed, leaving the configuration running on the WordPress site…?
I’m wondering if anyone on this list has any relevant WordPress experience, and any
suggestions for files/configurations to check in WordPress to see where these redirects
might be happening? Also more than happy to explore the fact that my Apache configuration
could be wrong and need tuning, and open to any other suggestions to try and ‘fix’ these
redirects one way or another (the main thing I want is consistency across all of them!).
Many thanks in advance,
Paul