Thread

Hello,

I’ve been setting up some 301 redirects for my client’s site and something strange happened. If I redirect the client’s old pages called “index.html” and “home.html” to the new EE site homepage, the browser throws an “Endless Loop” error. Any other pages I redirect work fine. I don’t understand what the problem is - is there some setting in EE that might cause this?

I have the Structure module installed, and the homepage URL is “home” - could that have something to do with the “home.html” part of the problem?

Thanks!

[Mod Edit: Moved to the Community Help forum]

See what they have to say on the support forums for Structure.

But I don’t know that it’s necessarily a Structure problem - seeing as “index.html” has nothing to do with Structure.

Good point; how are you setting up the 301s?  .htaccess?

Yup, standard .htaccess redirect:

Redirect /index.html <a href="http://www.domain.com">http://www.domain.com</a>

Redirect /index.html <a href="http://www.domain.com">http://www.domain.com</a>

If you nix that line from .htaccess, what happens?  I just tested one of my Structure powered sites and it showed the homepage of the site when I went to domain.com/index.html, even though I don’t have a template called “index.html.”  I’m not sure if that’s a feature of Structure or of EE.

In other words, you may not need that index.html redirect, at least for the content to display correctly… I suppose you’d still want to get rid of it for SEO though.

If I remove the “index.html” or “home.html” lines from the .htaccess file the problem goes away.

When I tested going to “http://www.mydomain.com/index.html”, I got a 404. Not sure why you got something different. Do you have your EE site set to redirect to the homepage instead of a 404 page? That may be why you got the result you did.

I have to have “index.html” redirect because the client’s old homepage was at “index.html”. So it needs to be redirected in case one of their customers had it bookmarked, so she doesn’t get a 404 error on the new site. Same with “home.html” - it was a page on their old site and it needs to be redirected for SEO and for users who may have it bookmarked.

It’s probably because I gave my homepage a Structure URL of index.html, so of course it worked. :: face palm ::

Trying /index.html on a different Structure site, I got the same result you did - 404.  Sigh.

Fortunately our other developer’s keeping an eye on this; here’s what he had to say:

The person’s Apache is probably configured to try index.html as the default page name, so it is looping.  They might be able to change that by adding the line:

DirectoryIndex index.php index.html

- or -

Redirect /index.html http://www.domain.com/index.php

Note, with option 1, the DirectoryIndex line must go above the redirect rule(s).

Hey, it worked!

I used

DirectoryIndex index.php index.html

before my Redirects and it worked great, plus home.html is redirecting correctly as well.

Thanks, PressEnter!

Wohoo!

You’re welcome.

I should note that this doesn’t seem to work if you’ve removed index.php from your URLs - although I’m sure there’s a way to make everything play nice together.

Try the other option and see if that’ll do the trick and play well with the other index.php rules:

Redirect /index.html <a href="http://www.domain.com/index.php">http://www.domain.com/index.php</a> 
Redirect /home.html <a href="http://www.domain.com/index.php">http://www.domain.com/index.php</a>