Unable to make a domain redirection in Django from example.com to www.example.com

Question

I get the following message when I browse to example.com

500 - Internal Server Error

I get my 404 error message when I browse to www.example.com which indicates my site is alive.

How can you make a domain redirection without .htaccess by Django from example.com to www.example.com?

My urls.py

     from django.conf.urls.defaults import *

     from django.contrib import admin
     admin.autodiscover()

     urlpatterns = patterns('',
     # Example:
     # (r'^{{ project_name }}/', include('{{ project_name }}.foo.urls')),

     (r'^home/', include('index.html')),

     # Uncomment the admin/doc line below and add 'django.contrib.admindocs' 
     # to INSTALLED_APPS to enable admin documentation:
     (r'^admin/doc/', include('django.contrib.admindocs.urls')),

     (r'^admin/(.*)', admin.site.root),
     )

[edit]

I have the following answer from Djangohosting:

Remove the website proxy for [example.com] and add [example.com] in the aliases section of the [www.example.com] website.

I am not completely sure what it means.

1. How can you remove the website proxy for example.com?
2. Where can you find the aliases section of the website www.example.com?

Answer 1

I don't know if it solves all your problems but if you want to do it via django, try a middleware

from django.http import HttpResponseRedirect

class WWWRedirectMiddleware(object):
    def process_request(self, request):
        if not request.META['HTTP_HOST'].startswith('www.'):
            return HttpResponseRedirect('http://www.example.com')

Remember that it must be executed before any other middleware.

Based on this one, didn't test it.

Answer 2

Checking out PREPEND_WWW setting might help.