.htaccess inconsistent redirect behavior

Question

I'm getting inconsistent results with what appears to me to be the exact same redirect. Can anyone see what I'm missing?

Here's my .htaccess file. You can see where I'm trying to redirect all of the contents of 3 directories to my file_not_found page.

The problem is that only one of the directories is redirecting properly. By "properly" I mean, that it shows in the browsers url bar that it's displaying www.hhoprofessor.com/file_not_found.

The bak directory works, but none of the rest do. For instance see the following examples:

When I type www.hhoprofessor.com/bak/random_file_name, it redirects to www.hhoprofessor.com/file_not_found. This is the correct behavior.

When I do the same with the other 2 directories, I get the following result: Typing www.hhoprofessor.com/inc/random_file_name doesn't change in the address bar, but does correctly show the content of the file_not_found page. Same result when I try the page subdirectory.

I need them to do a full forwarding like they do for the /bak subdir. I don't get why the same directive is not operating the same way.

I've tried this in Chrome and Opera and they both have the same behavior. Apache version is 2.4.33, and this is a hosted lamp server.

ErrorDocument 404 /file_not_found

Redirect 301 /.htaccess  http://www.hhoprofessor.com/file_not_found

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

# Redirect directories to file_not_found.php:
RewriteRule ^inc/(.*) file_not_found [R,L]
RewriteRule ^bak/(.*) file_not_found [R,L]
RewriteRule ^pages/(.*) file_not_found [R,L]

# require www prefix
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^hhoprofessor\.com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTPS}:s on:(s) 
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http%1://www\.hhoprofessor\.com/$1 [R=301,L]

# Homepage: /   redirects to http 
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} on
RewriteRule ^$  http://www\.hhoprofessor\.com/ [R=301,L]

One more datum that might apply: This is an addon domain and is in a subdir to the main domain. I've added the following line to the top of the main domain's .htaccess which is supposed to stop processing anything coming to the addon domain:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?hhoprofessor\.com$
RewriteRule ^.*$ '-' [L]

In looking through that file, I just don't see how it could be affecting this situation, even if the whole main domain .htaccess were being processed.

Can anyone see what I'm missing?

Answer 1

Ok, this resolved thanks to Justin's answer. Although, I'm not sure exactly why. The file permissions and ownership across all 3 directories were identical. So, I still don't know why one worked correctly and the other 2 didn't. There was no permission or ownership problem causing a 403 status code. Dirs were 755 and files were 644.

But I tried making the permissions on all 3 of these dirs 700. After that, all redirects worked as expected. But, it's counter-intuitive. The incorrect behavior was giving the status code of 403 (forbidden). And then when I changed the permissions so that the directory was indeed forbidden, then it redirected with 302. Go figure. But it works.

By the way, I would up-vote Justin's answer more if I could. The tip to analyze the status code will help me with problems in the future. I didn't know about that one.

later edit: I've removed all redirects and I'm only using the file permissions now. I set up the 404 and 403 documents and everything works fine. It is worthy of note that using the ErrorDocument directive causes these to be sent with a 302 code. But that should be find SEO-wise as none of these are linked anywhere. All normal pages have status code 200.

Answer 2

If you want to debug such behavior, the first reflex to adopt is to analyze network traffic and http headers. Thanks to that, you'd have seen that both inc and pages folders end up with a 403 (Forbidden) code. You need to change permissions on those folders (and files recursively, maybe).

bak folder test output:

inc (same for pages) folder test output:

BUT, from a SEO point of view, what you're trying to do is not good. You should only keep ErrorDocument 404 /file_not_found and remove your redirect rules. It automatically sends a 404 (Not Found) code without changing the url. Quick reminder: changing the url means redirect, in your case you send a 302 (Moved Temporarily) code instead of a 404, which is not the expected behavior.