.htaccess redirect for blackberry not working

Question

I am trying to redirect blackberry users to my mobile site by doing:

# redirect for blackberry users
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.BlackBerry.$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/m/ [R=301]

in my .htaccess, but nothing happens when I try to access from the device, I've already deleted cache and cookis and nothing works. I have been googling around and it seems I'm doing the redirect correctly but I guess not, what am I missing?

My .htaccess only contains that by the way.

Edit The .htaccess in my server's root.

Answer 1

If this isn't the only rule in your .htaccess file, you might have an issue where a later rule messes up your redirect. To redirect immediately, you need to include the L flag.

I also suspect that your regular expression for the user agent is probably not correct for the input you're testing against, since the two . match just one character on either side of the word "BlackBerry". It would also be a good idea to guard against a redirect loop with a check to see if you're already in /m/ (although if you have mod_rewrite directives in a .htaccess file in that directory it's not important).

Putting all of that together, we get something like the following:

# Check for x-wap-profile/Profile headers
RewriteCond %{HTTP:x-wap-profile} !^$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP:Profile}       !^$ [OR]
# Check for BlackBerry anywhere in the user agent string
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT}    BlackBerry [NC]
# Make sure we're not in /m/ already
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI}        !^/m/
RewriteRule ^ http://example.com/m/ [R=301,L]

You may also want that RewriteRule to be...

RewriteRule ^.*$ http://example.com/m/$0 [R=301,L]

...if the content is named the same (but mobile-friendly) in the /m/ directory.

Answer 2

Make sure your BlackBerry is not in "emulation mode" where it passes the user-agent for IE or Firefox instead of BlackBerry. You can check in the browser's option screen.

A better way around this would be to base your rewrite rule on the "x-wap-profile" and/or "profile" headers, which the mobile browser should always send accurately.