Exclude a directory from a rewriterule using ISAPI rewrite 3 - windows

Basically I've recently added the below rule in my httpd.conf for ISAPI rewrite on an IIS server to make sure that it always defaults to lower-case file and directory names.
RewriteRule ^(.*[A-Z].*)$ $1 [CL,R=301,L]
This is all fine and dandy for every part of the site except for one directory which we can call /MisbehavingDir, the code in this particular directory is filled with mixed-case filenames and lots of server- and client-side scripting that would have to be rewritten to use all lower-case in order to work properly (with the RewriteRule above it seems to hit a couple of 301s in the wrong places which causes that part of the site to function poorly to say the least).
Since I'm not in the mood for rewriting that part of the site I'd love to find a good way to modify the above regex so that it matches everything except paths starting with MisbehavingDir and since my regex-fu isn't really good enough I figured I'd ask here.
Is there a simple "beautiful" solution to this that anyone wants to share or should I just set aside several days to rewrite the app, then test it and go through that whole dance?

Well, apparently the trick was to add a rewritecond statement that looks something like RewriteCond %{URL} ^(?!/MisbehavingDir/.*$) to make ISAPI rewrite skip the next rule.

Related

Apache2 mixing mod_vhosts_alias and mod_rewrite

The Apache2 docs recommend mod_rewrite as a last resort for specifying which directory to send a given host request to. They said use mod_vhosts_alias. I set that up and its working without problem. However, I have a specific case that entails some mod_rewriting.
I have a domain like mydomain.com and a large number of subnames like sub.mydomain.com and sub2.mydomain.com. These subdomains all map to corresponding directories. But the subdomains will also have full top-level domains that map to respective directories. For instance:
sub.mydomain.com will map to the same directory as awesomeproducts.com sub2.mydomain.com will map to the same directory as widgets.com
What would be the best way to make sure both these methods of accessing each site will work without conflict?
Since the docs only say mod_rewrite isn't as "graceful" as mod_vhosts_alias, I didn't know if I ought to use mod_rewrite completely by itself for my situation or if I should be trying to mix the two approaches somehow.
Is mixing them the way to go or will that create problems?
The behaviors of RewriteRule and RewriteCond change when using mod_vhost_alias. Its been a few days since I tinkered with it so I'm sketchy on it, but watch out for the way RewriteRule interprets the portion of the URL to be rewritten. It may change when using mod_vhost_alias... and RewriteCond behavior might change too.
To accomplish the question I was asking about, I ended up using symbolic links for the actual domains. I setup a bunch of subdomains with associated folders so that sub1.stddomain.com would go to the folder sub1.stdomain.com. Then I added a symbolic link that maps domain1.com to the sub1.stddomain.com folder. That way anyone who visits domain1.com is shown the site in the sub1.stddomain.com folder.
IMPORTANT: After all that work and testing, I ended up going back to to a collection of virtualhost files WITHOUT mod_vhost_alias. Turns out that there is a known problem with mod_vhost_alias. DocumentRoot isn't correctly set when using it. This breaks tons of scripts. It was patched in February 2012 with new special variables and the programming team at Apache dropped the ball. They never wrote any documentation explaining how to use the patch or new variables.
I reopened the issue and stated that its still a bug since you can't write code and not tell anyone how to use it and then call it fixed. Unfortunately the issue had already been ignored for YEARS and it will probably continue to get ignored even though they supposedly wrote code for it.
RECOMMENDED LESSON FROM ALL THIS: Don't use mod_vhost_alias. Write shell scripts to manage your vhost files using one more template files.

Multiple index files in different folders?

I just figured out that if I have multiple folders in my website such as logout and login I can then have a log out/in page within the folders called index.php
Now when someone goes to project.com/login/ it will load up the index.php file in that folder and the url will look nice.
Is there any problem in doing this?
As Candy Pointed out it is better to do this with url rewrite rather heeps of folders and index files. I went and looked it up and you can do a lot of cool things.
for the basics:
http://www.addedbytes.com/for-beginners/url-rewriting-for-beginners/
http://www.yourhtmlsource.com/sitemanagement/urlrewriting.html
Instead of creating many folders which would make the site confusing (for the developer) and having numerous index.php files which would also get confusing if you were editing more than one at a time, you can use the apache mod_rewrite module which lets you transparently (the url in the address bar stays the same) redirect one URL to another. You could use this to clean up messy url's and have /login/ instead of /login/login.php or /user/1335591/ or even /user/'username'/ rather than an ugly url which is hard to remember like the following: /user/user.php?user=1335591
to start first put RewriteEngine on in your .htaccess file to turn it on
redirects are then written in the .htaccess file in sequence
Below is an example:
RewriteRule ^products/([0-9][0-9])$ /products/$1/ [R]
RewriteRule ^products/([0-9][0-9])/$ /productinfo.php?prodID=$1
If the user types in products/12 the first rule will append a trailing slash to it. The second rule will transparently redirect this URL to productinfo.php?prodID=12

Forced trailing slash redirect rule causing strange results

I've got a .htaccess file that's attempting to force trailing slashes.
I've previously asked this question on Server Fault because I had assumed that it was purely a server question, but I now have a sneaking suspicion that my problem is related to jQuery Mobile.
Please reference this Server Fault question for the .htaccess configuration.
From that question, the result of visiting http://domain.tld/mobile/hoursis:
http://domain.tld/var/www/html/mobile/hours/
where it should be:
http://domain.tld/mobile/hours/
The entire site is written in jQuery Mobile, and although my expertise is limited, I think this bug/drawback might have something to do with the problem.
This is definitely a mod_rewrite issue, not jquery mobile as the var/www/html is a part of the file path for the server which jquery has nothing to do with.
Have you tried setting a rewrite base? Add the following after turning the rewrite engine on
RewriteBase /var/www/html/
This should have been asked in your original question on ServerFault as the answer has nothing to do with your client library. Instead, you pobably just have to add a L (and probably QSA too) to the list of flags of your RewriteRule like
RewriteRule ^(.+[^/])$ /$1/ [R,L,QSA]
See http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/rewrite/flags.html#flag_r for more information.

mod_rewrite issue

I have some old files that need to point to new files - the old files are indexed from Google like this: old%20file%20here.pdf - because the last people doing the site left spaces in file names - but in my Rewrites they just aren't matching the old file to send to the new - does anyone know how to ignore the %20 and redirect right?
My rewrite code here:
RewriteRule ^downloads/old%file%20here.pdf$ http://www.domain.co.uk/new-file.pdf [R=301,L]
Its working fine for rest of redirects which are pages with normal URLs.
found the answer, this is it
[space]name (so should be \ name) instead of what i was doing which was \%20name
hope this helps any one else!

More Mod_rewrite problems

Ok, have a client that has existing links coming in from searchmarketing. I am in process of migrating the program from Cold Fusion to PHP.
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^cat_ap~([^~]+)~(.*)\.htm$ /urban/cat_ap.php?$1=$2 [R]
Currently I have a URL structure:
http://www.test.com/urban/cat_ap~nid~5964.htm
which the above rewrite rule changes to
http://www.test.com/urban/cat_ap.php?nid=5964
Now I want to be able to get the variables out of the query string but maintain the url in the browser to the original http://www.test.com/urban/cat_ap~nid~5964.htm but still have it go to the PHP page.
So that when someone goes to http://www.test.com/urban/cat_ap~nid~5964.htm it actually goes to http://www.test.com/urban/cat_ap.php?nid=5964 but still shows http://www.test.com/urban/cat_ap~nid~5964.htm.
Any ideas on how to do this?
Thanks
Mike
You are already doing this on this line (but change the R flag to L):
RewriteRule ^/urban/cat_ap~([^~]+)~(.*).htm$ /urban/cat_ap.php?$1=$2 [L]
The URL that the user hits will still show as the .htm version while the server processes it as the .php
The R flag explicitly induces an external redirect. So just remove the R flag.
I think you'll need to set up reverse proxying to achieve the desired behaviour, and use the P flag with your rewrite rules. I've used a site with this sort of configuration before, so can say that it works, but I'm afraid I've never configured it myself :-(
A good first step at least would be to install mod_proxy and get it loaded and running. The mod_rewrite cookbook page on the P flag has a small amount of detail on proxying RewriteRules, and links through to the ProxyPassReverse directive documentation at apache.org.

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