Wanted: Rewrite Rules!

[Rex__]

I have tried all kinds of methods for getting a "clean" URL to work on my win98/Apache server, but nothing worked (see earlier post from me).

I assume that rewriting a URL will work, but I have no familiarity with regular expressions.

I would like to turn this:

http://users.mysite.com/34

into this:

http://www.mysite.com/users/showuser.php?userid=34

where showuser.php shows a small profile, pulled from a database, of the user. My goal is to have an easy-to-remember URL for the user.

My rewrite engine is compiled and turned on, and I have set up and tested the users.mysite.com DNS on my ISP.

All I need now are some rewrite rules. I don't care if they are global or in the vhost or in the directory, so long as it works I'll take anything at this point.

[bretticus]

Hi, your worst nightmare is back ;-)

I do have experience with regular expressions.

Anyways something like:

RewriteRule ^/[0-9] /showuser.php?userid=$1 [R]

might work, yes you inspired me to study ;-) In case I wanna do this. 😃

[bretticus]

Ummm put a plus after that [0-9]....

[0-9]+ meaning one or more numbers, \d+ might work also, but to find out here's a good reference:

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/misc/rewriteguide.html

[Rex__]

Hello Bretticus,

Yes, the nightmare still haunts me!

Now the browser keeps timing out and Apache isn't writing to the error or transfer logs for this virtualhost, so I don't know how to check what URL it's trying to direct to. Is it held in an environment variable that I could access somehow? I know the rewrites are doing something, because when I change them and restart Apache I get different browser errors (like illegal path and cannot locate host errors).

I tried hard-coding the url by just inserting the userid directly into the search pattern (see below), and it still doesn't work. The browser times out.

This is what I have at the end of my config file now:

NameVirtualHost *

<VirtualHost *>
ServerAdmin [e-mail]
DocumentRoot "C:\apache\www"
ServerName www.mysite.com
ServerAlias mysite.com
<Directory "C:\apache\www">
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *>
ServerAdmin [e-mail]
DocumentRoot "C:\apache\www\users"
ServerName users.mysite.com
ErrorLog "C:\apache\www\users\errors.log"
TransferLog "C:\apache\www\users\transfers.log"
<Directory "C:\apache\www\users">
RewriteEngine on
#RewriteBase /
#RewriteRule ^/[0-9]+ /showuser.php?userid=$1 [R]
#RewriteRule $/34 /showuser.php?userid=34 [R]
RewriteRule ^/34 /showuser.php?userid=34 [R]
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>

[bretticus]

Sorry, I've never played with mod_rewrite before. I wonder if it could be the ?userid=34 stuff giving you grief.

Sorry, anyone else out there have mod_rewrite experience???

[bretticus]

Just for kicks...

Try:

<VirtualHost *>
ServerAdmin [e-mail]
DocumentRoot "C:\apache\www\users"
ServerName users.mysite.com
ErrorLog "C:\apache\www\users\errors.log"
TransferLog "C:\apache\www\users\transfers.log"
<Directory "C:\apache\www\users">
RewriteEngine on
#RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^/([0-9]+)$ /showuser.php?userid=$1 [R,L]
#RewriteRule $/34 /showuser.php?userid=34 [R]
#RewriteRule ^/34 /showuser.php?userid=34 [R]
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>

And if by some odd chance that works ;-) ... great!! If not, you just need to read up on this. Might I suggest

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/mod/mod_rewrite.html

as a place to start?

Unless somebody else comes along wiser with mod_rewrite that can tell you fast-like 😃

[Rex__]

I still can't get the rewrite to work. I have officially given up. I got the error doc to work, so now I'm having it parse the URL to get the data. This is working fine. I know that POST data won't be passed to error docs, so I'll just have to use the old URLs for submitting those forms.

Thanks for all your help!!!

One more note... I found out that session variables and cookies set at www.mysite.com domain don't apply at the users.mysite.com domain.