rewrite problems (htaccess) - apache

Question

Having some experience with procedural php I watched some tutorials about OOP and the MVC model (with php). Things start to get more clear and I wanted to put the theory to practice.
The tutorial I'm following works with an app folder and a public folder, both subfolders of the root directory. There's an index.php file in the public folder and a htaccess file that redirects all requests (in the public folder) to none existing files to index php. The code in that file is:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
Options -Multiviews
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /public
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^(.+)$ index.php?url=$1 [QSA,L]
</IfModule>
That works fine.
In the root folder there is also a htaccess file with the purpose of redirecting all url requests to the public folder (in case /public/ is not in the url. The code in that file is:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^$ public/ [L]
RewriteRule (.*) public/$1 [L]
</IfModule>
That goes wrong, and it's the second RewriteRule that causes the problems. If I for example browse to
www.mywebsite.com
the browser redirects to www.mywebsite.com/public/index.php
But if I browse to www.mywebssite.com/shop (shop is not an existing file) I suppose the browser redirects to www.mywebsite.com/public/index.php?url='shop', but instead there is an internal server error. It seems to be the second RewriteRule that causes the problem.
What could be the problem?

Answer 1

I am on mobile I haven't tested it but looks like you could be reaching out to maximum redirect limits here why because your condition in your root htaccess isn't looking good to me, try this once.
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^$ public/ [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/public/? [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) public/$1 [L]
</IfModule>
Issues in OP's approach: You haven't mentioned any condition to when it should redirect so it doesn't know when to stop hence it's creating a loop here IMHO.