htaccess - assistance forcing WWW and HTTPS. Currently results in https://www.example.com/example.com

Question

I'm having issues setting up htaccess properly and was hoping to get some help getting it squared away. Currently I have my primary domain on my shared hosting routed to /public_html/example.com (for consistency's sake) using the following htaccess in the /public_html/ folder:

# .htaccess main domain to subdirectory redirect 

RewriteEngine on 
# Change example.com to be your main domain. 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www.)?example.com$ 

# Change 'subdirectory' to be the directory you will use for your main domain. 
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/example.com/ 

# Don't change the following two lines. 
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f 
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d 

# Change 'subdirectory' to be the directory you will use for your main domain. 
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /example.com/$1 

# Change example.com to be your main domain again. 
# Change 'subdirectory' to be the directory you will use for your main domain 
# followed by / then the main file for your site, index.php, index.html, etc. 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www.)?example.com$ 
RewriteRule ^(/)?$ example.com/ [L]

That works all fine but now I want to add lines to force WWW and to force HTTPS. I have a htaccess file that works great for my subdomains but when I add that to my /public_html/example.com/.htaccess file it creates an odd behavior. Any traffic to example.com redirects to https://www.example.com/example.com . This code is shown below.

#First rewrite any request to the wrong domain to use the correct one (here www.)
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]

#Now, rewrite to HTTPS:
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]

Can anyone help me merge the two so I get the directory relocation to /public_html/example.com, forced WWW and forced HTTPS all in one go? Thank you very much in advance!

Answer 1

This is being caused by another rule in your .htaccess . The rule in question is:

RewriteRule ^(/)?$ example.com/ [L]

Or to be more precise the [L] flag at the end of the rule. Which stands for LAST . This is telling your .htaccess to stop any rules pass this rewrite rule.

You can simply fix this by either putting your new rules to the top of your .htaccess , removing the [L] flag or by removing the other rule altogether.

Buyers choice.