[RESOLVED] Assistence in Mod Rewrite rules/

leatherback

Hi All,

After running a CMS for a few years, I am rebuilding the way it operates.

For an old set of sites, I am going to do a very basic revamping. I have all paths and filenames stored in the database, so I can fairly easy do a redirect, with the old filestruture remaining intact, yet removing all files except a few from the server:

Internally do:
domain.com/section1/../page.php
to:
domain.com/index.php?section1/../page.php

In the index.php I will resolve which old page was called, and act accordingly. For new sites I will take the thing a step further, but for now I have little choice.

There are a few directories which cannot be rewritten, as content is static. So I want to ignore those.

For my test folder I wrote this set of rules:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/test/((ttt\.php|manage|link|admin|contact)(/.*)?)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ ttt.php?p=$1 [L]

Which basically refers all pages which are NOT ttt.php, or in folders manage, link, admin or contact, to ttt.php, with the path in the querystring.

My main problem: Why do I need to define the /test/ folder in the condition? I have the .htacces in the folder test, which sits in the root of my webserver. I thought it would take all paths locally; This does not work:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^((ttt\.php|manage|link|admin|contact)(/.*)?)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ ttt.php?p=$1 [L]

Anybody any suggestions what I am missing? What pitfalls might this code cause?

Thx,

Jelle.

Roger_Ramjet

OK, it is because you are working in per-directory mode. By the time the rewrite is triggered Apache has already mapped the URL to a physical file path, which in most cases bears little resemblance to the original URL path. The rewritting actually involves reconstructing a URL to the new file and then parsing that to the physical filesystem. Now apache knows the hostname but not what the other parts of the original URL were so you need to include the domain path in order for it to construct the corrrect URL.

Remember, it could be the case that .htaccess in higher level folders have also done a rewrite to get to this rewrite rule. Certainly it is the case that per-server rewrites have taken place for a virtual server. Do you get me?

You can elliminate the need for /test/ by using the

RewriteBase /test

directive in that .htaccess file which tells apache to prepend the given path along with the domain.

The good thing about this is that you can set the base to another folder at any level from document root.

Roger_Ramjet

Rereading my answer I realise that while I'm sure you will get it Leatherback, many others who may read this will not and telling them to read the Apache manual would be no use. For anyone who may find this after a search then:

Apache takes a URL like http://mydomain.com/test/test.php and maps it to the physical filesystem.
On a shared server this means setting the document root for mydomain.com to something like /home/fhlinux210/xyz/mydomain.com/user then mapping /test/ to /home/fhlinux210/xyz/mydomain.com/user/test/ but it could just as well be that it is mapped to /home/fhlinux210/abc/myotherdomain.com/user/rewriten/mytest

When this is done, apache then checks for .htaccess in that folder and encounters the rewrite rule.

Now a rewrite rule can specify any other file on any accessible server so apache cannot just assume that the new file is in the same folder. So the rewriting actually involves constructing a new URL to the target file and then processing that new URL from scratch.

In order to do this the sub-folder parts of the URL must be provided or apache will only be able to construct http://mydomain.com/newfile.php
The base '/test/' can be given in the rewrite condition or preferably by a RewriteBase directive, and the result will be http://mydomain.com/test/newfile.php

Hope this helps you out. 😃

leatherback

Roger Ramjet wrote:
Rereading my answer I realise that while I'm sure you will get it Leatherback, many others who may read this will not and telling them to read the Apache manual would be no use.

Cheers Roger,

Not sure whether I deserve so much confidence: I am a just a simple biologist, playing around on the web in spare time.. Then again.. I did understand what you meant, even though I am not happy with your reply ;-) Rather have you said some thing like 'You silly twit; Of course you need to remove that slash there-and-there'. But well. I suppose I need to reconfigure my .htaccess if I need the rewrite deeper than at root-level.

Thx for the rewrite base. Looks like a second-best option!