What's wrong with my RewriteRule? - mod-rewrite

My .htaccess file currently looks like this
AddType x-mapp-php5 .php
Options +FollowSymLinks
Options +Indexes
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^account$ /account/orders.php [L]
When I go to http://mywebsite.com/account it properly shows the page at http://mywebsite.com/account/orders.php. But when I change the RewriteRule to
RewriteRule ^account/orders$ /account/orders.php [L]
and then I go to http://mywebsite.com/account/orders, I get Error 404 Page Not Found. What did I do wrong?
******Additional Details**
I finally diagnosed the problem. But I don't understand why my solution works. Consider the scenario where account/orders.php exists.
The following rule will not work
RewriteRule ^account/orders$ account/orders.php [L]
The following rule will work
RewriteRule ^account/order$ account/orders.php [L]
Ie., the rewrite rule will fail if the Pattern evaluates to an existing file. So when the pattern is the same as the substitution, but minus the extension, the rewrite rule will fail. If I add a file called account/order.php, then both rules will fail.
Why does this happen?

I don't see how your first example would work, because I believe that intial slashes are also passed on.
RewriteRule ^/account/orders$ /account/orders.php [L]

Have you tried a relative path?
RewriteRule ^account/orders$ account/orders.php [L]
Edit   You should also make sure to have MultiViews disabled. This causes that Apache does some additional vague file matching to find similar named files and thus /account/orders would be mapped to /account/orders.php before it’s passed to mod_rewrite.

Strange, it seems ok to me...
If you have access to Apache Configuration try to enable RewriteLog and RewriteLogLevel for some debug...
Also take a look in the site's log files (always if you have access)

I would at first try to add a redirect to my rules, so I can see in the browser what is happening on the server.
RewriteRule ^account$ /account/orders.php [L,R]
Also make sure that there are no other rules (previous ones) interfering, just in case you are not showing all of your .htaccess file here.

I'm answering my own question because I finally diagnosed the problem. But I don't understand why my solution works. Consider the scenario where account/orders.php exists.
The following rule will not work
RewriteRule ^account/orders$ account/orders.php [L]
The following rule will work
RewriteRule ^account/order$ account/orders.php [L]
Ie., the rewrite rule will fail if the Pattern evaluates to an existing file. So when the pattern is the same as the substitution, but minus the extension, the rewrite rule will fail. If I add a file called account/order.php, then both rules will fail.
Why does this happen?

Related

mod_rewrite: transform = and & in slashes

I was just looking for a solution to transform any =,?,& found in a query string into a simple slash /.
To be more specific, my link is something like:
http://www.mydomain.com/product.php?c=1&sc=12&products_id=15
and I would it like this:
http://www.mydomain.com/product.php/c/1/sc/12/products_id/15
whatever the master page could be (in this case is product.php, but it could be foo.php, bar.php...or else).
I have googled a lot but didn't find any good solution to achieve what i'm looking for.
I have found complex rewrite rules, but they all include the "page name" into them:
i.e.
RewriteRule ^/?index/([^/]+)/([^/]+)$ /index.php?foo=$1&bar=$2 [L,QSA]
That rule is only applicable to index.php and to known variables like foo, bar.
I need a more general one, whatever the master page is, whatever the variables are.
Can this be done?
Any suggestion?
Thanks
I assume you're using apache >= 2.2. Add this to your apache conf:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
# you absolutely need to use RewriteBase if this snippet is in .htaccess
# if the .htaccess file is located in a subdirectory, use
# RewriteBase /path/to/subdir
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^(=|&)*([^=&]+)(=|&)?(.*?)=*$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1/%2?%4= [N,NE]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^=$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1? [R,L]
</IfModule>
The first RewriteCond/RewriteRule pair repeatedly matches a token delimited by & or = and adds it to the path. The important flag is the [N] that causes the whole ruleset to start over again, as often as the rule matches. Additionally, a = is appended to the end of the query string. This is to create a mark in the URL that at least one rewrite has happened.
The second ruleset checks for the = mark that remains after the URL has been rewritten completely and issues a redirect.
Have a look at http://wiki.apache.org/httpd/RewriteQueryString for some useful hints.

Rewrite Query String with .htaccess

I'm trying to do a very simple rewrite of a query string
http://www.example.com/library.php?q=abscessed-tooth
to
http://www.example.com/library/abscessed-tooth
This is the code that I've written in my .htaccess file and it is doing nothing
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/library/?([^/]*)/?\/http://www.example.com/library.php?q=$1 [L]
Maybe likely .htaccess files are not considered in your environment. If in doubt turn on RewriteLogging as it is explained in the excellent documentation of the rewriting module.
Oh, and check the error log, you have a syntax error in the RewriteRule anyway: RewriteRule takes 2 arguments plus flags, your rule has only a single argument:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^library/([^/]*) http://www.example.com/library.php?q=$1 [L]
You need dollar sign in the end of "left" part not question mark:
^/library/([^/]*)/$ http://www.example.com/library.php?q=$1 [L]
Also do you need the question mark between / and ( ? It doesn't look like lookahead or lookbehind?
Try without wrapping slashes as well
^library/([^/]*)$ http://www.example.com/library.php?q=$1 [L]

easyphp .htaccess rules

i need to rewrite rules in my installation of easyphp on windows 7.
i need to make sure the rules are loaded correctly and i don't have to create tons of rules. also, when i copy the .htaccess to my server (which is linux) i want to make sure its working properly.
i have no experience with this and here's what i found diging the internet:
RewriteRule (.*) index.php?s=$1
now, if i have basic page like 'contact-us' its ok but if i have sub pages it does not. how can i create sub folders?
thank you
Here's what you need to do:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^([a-z0-9_\-]+)/?$ index.php?main=$1 [NC,L]
RewriteRule ^([a-z0-9_\-]+)/([a-z0-9_\-]+)/?$ index.php?main=$1&sub=$2 [NC,L]
This will allow you to have pages like:
http://www.domain.com/mainpage/ or
http://www.domain.com/mainpage or
http://www.domain.com/mainpage/subpage/ or
http://www.domain.com/mainpage/subpage
/? Means the slash is optional
[NC] This makes the test case-insensitive - differences between 'A-Z' and 'a-z' are ignored, both in the expanded TestString and the CondPattern. This flag is effective only for comparisons between TestString and CondPattern. It has no effect on filesystem and subrequest checks.
[L] The [L] flag causes mod_rewrite to stop processing the rule set. In most contexts, this means that if the rule matches, no further rules will be processed.
All the information about flags and rules: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_rewrite.html

replace character in rewrite rule

Here are my current rules:
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^to=(one|seventeen|thirty\+four)
RewriteRule ^/folder/page.php$ http://www.site.com/folder/category/%1? [L]
RewriteRule ^folder/category/(.+)\+(.+)$ http://www.site.com/folder/category/$1-$2 [L]
The first rule works fine, it redirects perfectly if the word is in the query string, but I can't get thirty+four to become thirty-four when redirected.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
For starters, RewriteRule ^/folder/page.php$ will never match anything. The URI's get the prefix (the leading slash) removed if the rules are in an .htaccess file instead of server config.
Secondly, since you've included http://www.site.com/ in your targets, that means the browser will get redirected instead of internally rewritten. You need to remove http://www.site.com/ from your first rule so that the second one can be applied.
Here's what should work:
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^to=(one|seventeen|thirty\+four)
RewriteRule ^folder/page.php$ folder/category/%1 [NC,QSA,L]
RewriteRule ^folder/category/(.+)\+(.+)$ folder/category/$1-$2 [NC,QSA,L]
And now three hints:
1)
Please make sure you've read everything here before asking:
Here's the wiki of serverfault.com
The howto's htaccess official guide
The official mod_rewrite guide
2)
Please try to use the RewriteLog directive: it helps you to track down problems:
# Trace:
# (!) file gets big quickly, remove in prod environments:
RewriteLog "/web/logs/mywebsite.rewrite.log"
RewriteLogLevel 9
RewriteEngine On
3)
My favorite tool to check for regexp:
http://www.quanetic.com/Regex (don't forget to choose ereg(POSIX) instead of preg(PCRE)!)
You use this tool when you want to check the URL and see if they're valid or not.

Problem redirect CodeIgniter URLs to WWW

I have a CI application that uses .htaccess for URL routing. My basic setup is as follow:
RewriteRule ^$ /var/www/html/ferdy/jungledragon/index.php [L]
RewriteCond $1 !^(index\.php|images|img|css|js|swf|type|themes|robots\.txt|favicon\.ico|sitemap\.xml)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /var/www/html/ferdy/jungledragon/index.php/$1 [L]
These rules are pretty standard for CI apps. They rewrite all URLs (except for those in the exception list) to the index.php front controller. The lines above also hide index.php, as it would normally appear as part of every URL.
So far, so good. Everything works just fine. Now, for the sake of SEO I would like to force all traffic to www. So I extended the rules as follow:
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^$ /var/www/html/ferdy/jungledragon/index.php [L]
RewriteCond $1 !^(index\.php|images|img|css|js|swf|type|themes|robots\.txt|favicon\.ico|sitemap\.xml)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /var/www/html/ferdy/jungledragon/index.php/$1 [L]
rewritecond %{http_host} ^jungledragon.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.jungledragon.com/$1 [r=301,nc]
These last two lines rewrite http://jungledragon.com/anything URLs to http://www.jungledragon.com/anything URLs. This kind of works, but it brings back the index.php part back: http://jungledragon.com/anything becomes http://www.jungledragon.com/index.php/anything.
How exactly do I combine these rules so that they do not interfere with each other? I tried doing the WWW rewrite before the CI rules. That shows an Apache 301 page with an error, rather than doing the actual redirect.
Additionally, I would like to also include rules to get rid of trailing slashes, but for now let's keep the question simple. Note that I did find useful post here and elsewhere yet for some reason I still can't find the correct exact syntax for my situation.
Edit: Thanks for the help. This works:
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^jungledragon.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.jungledragon.com/$1 [r=301,nc,L]
RewriteRule ^$ /var/www/html/ferdy/jungledragon/index.php [L]
RewriteCond $1 !^(index\.php|images|img|css|js|swf|type|themes|robots\.txt|favicon\.ico|sitemap\.xml)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /var/www/html/ferdy/jungledragon/index.php/$1 [L]
mod_rewrite processes rules in a linear fashion. Rules at the top of the file are processed first.
The [nc] and [L] at the end of the rules are the options for how to process rules.
nc - nocase: case insensative
L - last: last rule in the execution (if you hit this, stop processing)
You need to put your www redirect rules above your CI rules so it will first add the www, THEN apply the CI rules to the newly re-written url. **And also use either the C or N flag with your www redirect rule so it will parse the next rule.
http://mysite.com/blah ==becomes==> http://www.mysite.com/blah ==becomes==> http://www.mysite.com/index.php/blah (Executed, not redirected)
What's happening currently is:
http://mysite.com/blah ==becomes==> http://mysite.com/index.php/blah (STOP)
Browser goes to http://mysite.com/index.php/blah and a second re-write pass is done since your exceptions stop /index.php urls from being processed
http://mysite.com/index.php/blah ==becomes==> http://www.mysite.com/index.php/blah (Redirected)
As Suggested, here is a link to mod_rewrite's documentation if you want to look further.
#LazyOne: Brainfart, sorry.
Here's an excerpt from the docs outlining the flags you'll probably need:
'chain|C' (chained with next rule)
This flag chains the current rule with the next rule (which itself can be chained with the following rule, and so on). This has the following effect: if a rule matches, then processing continues as usual - the flag has no effect. If the rule does not match, then all following chained rules are skipped. For instance, it can be used to remove the .www'' part, inside a per-directory rule set, when you let an external redirect happen (where the.www'' part should not occur!).
'next|N' (next round)
Re-run the rewriting process (starting again with the first rewriting rule). This time, the URL to match is no longer the original URL, but rather the URL returned by the last rewriting rule. This corresponds to the Perl next command or the continue command in C. Use this flag to restart the rewriting process - to immediately go to the top of the loop.
Be careful not to create an infinite loop!
'nocase|NC' (no case)
This makes the Pattern case-insensitive, ignoring difference between 'A-Z' and 'a-z' when Pattern is matched against the current URL.
'noescape|NE' (no URI escaping of output)
This flag prevents mod_rewrite from applying the usual URI escaping rules to the result of a rewrite. Ordinarily, special characters (such as '%', '$', ';', and so on) will be escaped into their hexcode equivalents ('%25', '%24', and '%3B', respectively); this flag prevents this from happening. This allows percent symbols to appear in the output, as in

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