How I redirected all the web traffic for my old domain to the new one

I recently decided to change the domain name of my personal website from emmanuelcorrales.com to emcorrales.com because it is shorter and easier to remember. I don’t want visitors of emmanuelcorrales.com to receive a 404 Not Found or any other error so I redirected all the traffic to emcorrales.com. In this article I’ll be sharing the steps I took to accomplish this.

Steps to redirect web traffic from old domain to the new one:

1. Launch a server for my old domain.
2. Setup virtual hosts for the old domain with Apache.
3. Configure the virtual host to redirect to the new domain.
4. Enable HTTPS for Apache
5. Install Let’s Encrypt SSL Self Signed Certificate for Apache

Launch a server for my old domain

To assign a server to my old domain, I launched a new instance of an Ubuntu Server then configured the DNS A records of emmanuelcorrales.com which was hosted at GoDaddy to point to the server’s external IP address. This article will not cover how I configured my DNS records to point to my server since every registrar provides a unique way of changing their DNS records. You must already have knowledge on how to configure the DNS with your registrar.

Setup virtual hosts for the old domain with Apache

Next I created a virtual host for emmanuelcorrales.com using the same steps from a guide I recently wrote.

Configure the virtual host to redirect to the new domain.

I configured the virtual host for emmanuelcorrales.com to redirect to https://emcorrales.com by editing /etc/apache2/sites-available/emmanuelcorrales.com.conf

sudo vim /etc/apache2/sites-available/emmanuelcorrales.conf

to look like this

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerAdmin admin@emmanuelcorrales.com
    ServerName emmanuelcorrales.com
    ServerAlias emmanuelcorrales.com
    DocumentRoot /var/www/emmanuelcorrales.com
    ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
    CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
    RedirectMatch permanent ^/(.*)$ https://emcorrales.com/$1
</VirtualHost>

The important part to note here is the line with the RedirectMatch. This line is the configuration I need to redirect traffic from emmanuelcorrales.com to https://emcorrales.com.

I restarted the Apache web server to apply the changes I’ve made to the configuration.

sudo service apache2 restart

After restarting, visiting http://emmanuelcorrales.com will redirect me to https://emcorrales.com.

Enable HTTPS for Apache

At this point HTTPS request is still not supported and visiting https://emmanuelcorrales.com causes an error on my browser. To support HTTPS request I configured Apache to enable SSL for my old domain by running the following commands:

sudo a2enmod ssl
sudo a2ensite default-ssl.conf
sudo service apache2 restart

After that I was able to access https://emmanuelcorrales.com through my browser. However, the browser warns me that my connection is not private because I have an invalid certificate. To remove this, I needed to install a certificate issued by a trusted Certificate Authority but unfortunately I don’t want to buy one so I installed the free certificate provided by Let’s Encrypt.

Install Let’s Encrypt SSL Self Signed Certificate for Apache

I cloned the repo of Let’s Encrypt to a directory on my server using Git.

sudo apt-get -y install git
cd /usr/local
sudo git clone https://github.com/letsencrypt/letsencrypt

Then I generated an SSL certifacte for my old domain by running the following commands below and entering all the required credentials.

cd /usr/local/letsencrypt
sudo ./letsencrypt-auto --apache -d emmanuelcorrales.com

After this the certificate was installed at /etc/letsencrypt/live and I confirmed the status of my SSL certificate by visiting the link below.

https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=emmanuelcorrales.com&latest

And that’s it. I have successfully redirected all urls from my old domain to the new one. If you know a better way to do this please don’t hesitate to approach me.