> On Thu, Aug 7, 2008 at 6:02 AM, Peter Cooper <pcoo...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> On Aug 7, 7:39 am, Peter Cooper <pcoo...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> > How do other Passenger users deal with removing or adding "www" to
>> > their URLs without using mod_rewrite?

>> > For example, if I have a sitehttp://www.example.com/, I might want
>> > all visitors tohttp://example.com/to redirect tohttp://www.example.com/
>> > (or vice versa). This is recommended for SEO purposes to help prevent
>> > duplicate content being detected. Normally you'd use a rewrite rule
>> > with a host-based condition to deal with this, but is there a way of
>> > doing it without activating mod_rewrite?

>> > I could always activate mod_rewrite and deal with it the classic way,
>> > but since it's hinted that this isn't a Good Thing (tm) to do, I'd
>> > like to avoid doing that.

>> Just to add in case it's useful for someone else, a few people have
>> suggested on Twitter having two virtual hosts, one for www and one
>> without, and then using a simple Redirect on one. That's not
>> acceptable in my case as I'm using cPanel and don't want to mess with
>> the VirtualHosts if I can avoid it (in which case mod_rewrite
>> reactivation is a better option).

> Hey Peter,

> Couldn't you use a before_filter on the application controller to test the
> request?  I do something similar for an ssl requiremet for specific
> controllers like:

>     def redirect_to_ssl
>       return if request.ssl?

>       unless (request.ssl? or RAILS_ENV == 'development')
>           redirect_to(url_for(params.merge({:protocol => 'https://'})))
>       end

>     end

> Of course the before_filter is redirect_to_ssl.

> Good luck,
> andy

> --
> Andrew Stone