Force Lowercase URLs in Apache

Forcing your URLs to lowercase (or another unified format) is essential to preventing duplicate links on your site.

And for most sites - especially content sites, this is a critical component of SEO and great user experience.

First, you will need to enable Apache’s “rewrite” library with the following command:

sudo a2enmod rewrite

But if it was not previous enabled, you’ll then need to restart Apache, if you are certain it is safe to restart at that time:

sudo service apache2 restart
sudo systemctl restart apache2

Once you’ve done that, there’s two common ways to force your URLs to lowercase.

Addding a rule to your .htaccess file

One option is to add these rules to your .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteMap lowercase int:tolower

With this approach, you won’t need to restart Apache. Your URLs will be automatically rewritten to lowercase right away!

Modifying your Apache configuration directly

Alternatively, there’s a similar approach you can take, if you have access to your server’s Apache configuration file.

Simply insert the same two lines just before the end of your primary <VirtualHost> tag:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ...
    RewriteEngine On
    Rewrite Map lowercase int:tolower
</VirtualHost>

If it’s safe to restart your web server at that time, you’ll then need to restart Apache once more.

Conclusion

That’s all! I always keep this snippet on hand for when I’m spinning up a new Apache server.

Thank you for reading, and I hope this article helped!