This guide is to help users who were previously on a case insensitive web server and hosting many directories and files on their server mixed with upper and lower case letters who wish to move to a server that has case sensitivity such as Linux, or more specifically Ubuntu running Apache.
In this scenario, the Ubuntu Apache server is also running a Multi-site WordPress, running multiple domains on the same server so the traditional ways of configuring the vhosts file may not possible.
The trick is to set up a rewrite rule that essentially takes any URL provided to the server, and interprets it as a lowercase URL.
This seems pointless at first, but the trick is that the files being migrated to the Multi-site WordPress server, can be copied in just lower case form.
I found the easiest trick is to simply zip up all of the files, and then unzip them.
zip -0 -r foo.zip foo/ unzip -LL foo.zip
This will zip up the foo directory (including the directory itself) that contains all of the files and folders, and then UNZIP it all using the -LL flag which makes it all lowercased folders and files.
You can then perform the command:
cp -r /foo/* /var/www/html
to move the contents of everything that was inside the foo folder, directly into the html folder.
This will take care of having a migrated set of data that’s strictly in lower cased form.
The next step is to have Apache actually reference the lower case version each time a request is made.
For that we’ll need to sure mod_rewrite is enabled if it’s not already by running:
sudo a2enmod rewrite sudo service apache2 restart
Next, we’ll need to edit the global apache2 conf file
sudo nano /etc/apache2/apache2.conf
At the bottom of the file include the lines:
RewriteEngine On RewriteMap lc int:tolower
Next, we’ll need to edit the .htaccess file used by WordPress
This should be found in the root of our webserver directory that WordPress is hosted on.
sudo nano /var/www/html/.htaccess
At the top of the file under the Options -Index (if it exists as the first line)
Place the lines of:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} [A-Z]
RewriteRule (.*) ${lc:$1} [R=301,L]
The RewriteCond will check if any characters in the URL contain a capital letter.
If there is a capital letter found, it will run the function lc (defined in the apache2.conf file) that will convert the string $1, which is the regex group defined by (.*) which is the whole URL in this case, to a lower case string.
It will then perform a redirect 301, and the L will indicate that this the LAST thing involved with this RewriteCond and RewriteRule set.