Remove WWW prefix from your website

Question

How does Stack Overflow (and other web sites) remove the \'www\' prefix when it\'s entered as part of a URL?

Is it a redirect, a rewrite or something else entirely?<

Answer 1

An easy way to do this is using the Apache "Redirect" directive:

    ServerName www.example.com
    Redirect permanent / http://example.com/



    ServerName example.com
    # remainder of server configuration goes here

The Redirect directive automatically preserves anything following the / in the URL. I find this method easier to read and understand than the Rewrite method.