This article is in quick note form and needs to be flushed out into an article.
For this website both the urls,
http://bonsaiframework.com and http://www.bonsaiframework will work.
However, in some cases you want to force what a consistent url for a variety of reasons,
- Vendor or product code that works with only a specific url.
- Improve index results from search engines
This can be accomplished using Apache's Rewrite.
Enable Rewrite Module
sudo a2ensite
Will result in showing a lsit of modules that you can enable. Select rewrite. If it is not there than it might already be enabled.
Verify Rewrite Module
It is actually somewhat difficult to verify that the module is loaded.
Fill in ways here.
Apply Directives
# Enforce www in front of url.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.bonsaiframework\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.bonsaiframework.com$1 [R,L]
I usually place these rules right after my ServerAlias lines in my virtual host.
Debugging
Talk about how to enable logging here.