Question

this has been bugging me for two years: how to smoothly, silently and automatically redirect users (and search engines!) from http://example.com/ to http://example.com/bin/view/Main/ and I finally have the answer!

Environment

-- MattWilkie - 10 Oct 2003

Answer

to automatically redirect from the top of your site to twiki (e.g. do away with the "lets get started page") , add the following to bin/.htaccess, before the blah blah files section:

<Files "index.html">
        SetHandler cgi-script
        allow from all
</Files>

~/public_html $ ln -s cgi-bin/view index.html  

Sorry, this doesn't work on Windows servers.

BTW, if you find yourself in the odd situtation where you can't turn off indexing on the bin directory (somebody points a browser to /cgi-bin/ and gets a directory listing instead of access denied) , create a symlink in the same way: ln -s cgi-bin/view cgi-bin/index.html

PS: I think these instructions, or something resembling them, should be written in the TWiki distributin docs

PPS: I haven't tried it yet, but this may also point to a solution for ShorterURLs on hosted sites

-- MattWilkie - 10 Oct 2003

On any platform that supports .htaccess, you can just edit the root .htaccess and add a line like
Redirect permanent /index.htm http://yoursite.com/bin/view/Main/WebHome
-- this way, you don't need any symlinks, and it works for all platforms...

-- TorbenGB - 16 Sep 2004

Maybe that should be in .htaccess commented out and in the install guide as a suggestion.

-- SamHasler - 16 Sep 2004

Yes, I did this just now by edit .htaccess under my /twiki directory:

Redirect /twiki/index.html http://mydomain.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome

It works!!

-- ChunhuaLiao - 13 Oct 2004

The Redirect command is not working for me.Is it possible that my Twiki (Cairo) installation (WIndows 2000 server, Apache) is not using .htaccess ? How do I find out ?

-- ChengappaCB - 23 Dec 2005

What I do is, inside the virtual host where I run TWiki:

   <LocationMatch ^/$>
     DirectoryIndex /bin/view
   </LocationMatch>

When users browse to http://your.domain.tld/ they get the Main.WebHome topic., without being redirected. Or you can point it to wherever you want, putting e.g. /bin/view/MyWeb as the DirectoryIndex.

-- AntonioTerceiro - 23 Dec 2005

Redirect command in .htaccess did not work for me, as I am not making use of the file (as far as I know). Alternatively, I created an index.html with the lines:

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="2; URL=http://twiki/bin/view/Sandbox/WebHome">

<h1>You will be redirected in 2 seconds. Please wait...</h1>

i think this suggestion was given by Peter Thoeny. Now when users type http://twiki, they are taken to the sandbox after 2 seconds.

-- ChengappaCB - 06 Jan 2006