How to rewrite the website root url to a new detsination?

Question

Using urlrewiter.net i am trying to do a 301 redirect of any requests to the website root to a new destination. e.g

www.example.com should be redirected to www.example.com/en/

How can i achieve this with urlrewriter.net i've tried the following rules but none work or go into an infinite loop.

    <redirect url="^www\.example\.com" to="/en/" />
    <redirect url="^www\.example\.com\/" to="/en/" />
    <redirect url="^www.example.com" to="/en/" />
    <redirect url="^www.example.com/" to="/en/" />
    <redirect url="/" to="/en/" />
    <redirect url="^/" to="/en/" />

Anyone know how to do this?

Answer 1

If you want to match "www.example.com" but not "www.example.com/en" (and thus avoid infinite recursion), you need to add a $ sign to the end of the regex. Try using these three rules:

<redirect url="^www\.example\.com$" to="www\.example\.com/en/" />
<redirect url="^example\.com$" to="www\.example\.com/en/" />
<redirect url="^www\.example\.com/$" to="www\.example\.com/en/" />

Adding a $ sign to the end mandates that the expression match the end of the string. So by adding a ^ to the beginning and a $ to the end, you can mandate that your expression be the entire string. I think the reason you were getting infinite recursion was the patterns you were using all match "www.example.com/en/" and redirect it to itself, which redirects it to itself again, etc.