Redirect 'myapp.com' to 'www.myapp.com' in rails without using htaccess?

Question

Using Morph Labs' Appspace to deploy a site means no automated way to redirect 'myapp.com' to 'www.myapp.com' (and no access to .htacess).

Is there an in-rails way to do this? Would I need a plugin like subdomain-fu?

More specifically, I'm trying to do something like:

• 'myapp.com' => 'www.myapp.com'
• 'myapp.com/session/new' => 'www.myapp.com/session/new'

Basically, I always want the 'www' subdomain prepended on every request (because the SSL cert specifically has a common name of 'www.myapp.com').

Answer 1

Maybe something like this would do the trick:

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  before_filter :check_uri

  def check_uri
    redirect_to request.protocol + "www." + request.host_with_port + request.request_uri if !/^www/.match(request.host)
  end
end

Answer 2

Carson's answer works great.

Here's the code to go the other way (www -> no www)

before_filter :check_uri

def check_uri
  if /^www/.match(request.host)
    redirect_to request.protocol + request.host_with_port[4..-1] + request.request_uri 
  end
end

Answer 3

I had to change Carson's answer to get this to work in Rails 3. I replaced request.uri with request.fullpath:

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  protect_from_forgery

  Rails.env.production? do
    before_filter :check_url
  end

  def check_url
    redirect_to request.protocol + "www." + request.host_with_port + request.fullpath if !/^www/.match(request.host)
  end
end

Answer 4

This worked great for me. I did make one small addition as I only wanted this behavior in my production environment:

def check_uri
  redirect_to request.protocol + "www." + request.host_with_port + request.request_uri if !/^www/.match(request.host) if Rails.env == 'production'
end

Answer 5

I know this is answered, but I thought everyone else should know about the CodeRack: Canonical Host solution. This is really nice as it allows for env specific redirects. http://coderack.org/users/tylerhunt/middlewares/6-canonical-host

Answer 6

Here is a couple of different ways:

 head :moved_permanently, :location => ‘http://www.newdomain.com’

another:

def rails_301
headers["Status"] = "301 Moved Permanently"
redirect_to "http://www.newdomain.com"
end 

Answer 7

For those of you who are looking to also force SSL using heroku, this worked well for me, based on Heroku SSL on root domain

In my DNS settings I set up a URL / Forward record (DNS Simple)

URL foo.com     3600        http://www.foo.com

The CNAME setup only needs to be setup for WWW

CNAME   www.foo.com 3600        providedssslendpoint.herokussl.com

I also had to setup and Alias for my root

ALIAS   foo.com 3600        providedsslendpoint.herokussl.com

Then I decided to simply replace foo.com with an env variable ENV['SITE_HOST'] (where SITE_HOST might equal www.foo.com or test.foo.com) so I can have control via my heroku configuration. That way, I can control what happens in different environments. (for setting up env variables locally see https://github.com/bkeepers/dotenv)

For example, my test app uses test.foo.com as the url it also has its own SSL endpoint so that works fine for me.

  before_filter :check_domain

  def check_domain
    if Rails.env.production? || Rails.env.testing? and request.host.downcase != ENV['SITE_HOST']
      redirect_to request.protocol + ENV['SITE_HOST'] + request.fullpath, :status => 301
    end
  end

From now on, end users will always access www with forced SSL. Old links will suffer a small hang but nothing noticeable.