Why is mod_rewrite adding var/www/html to the resulting url - apache

Question

I am trying to make my service backward compatible, since I have moved the service to a new path internaly, I still want the users to access it with the old url as not all of them have knowledge of this change.
I can accomplish what I want if I add [R] flag at the end of my rewrite rule but it redirects the url on the client side, which I don't want.
My rewrite code:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/old-path(.*)$ /new-path/$ [L]
</IfModule>
Although this rule results in the following url:
/var/www/html/new-path
Sample request looks something like:
https://host-name/old-path/param1/param2/param3/param4
and rewrite rule should just replace old-path with the new-path.
Can anyone give me some clues about what am I doing wrong? and how can I fix it?
Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

If your are aiming for 'hiding' the rewrite, try this:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/old-path/(.*)$ /new-path/$1 [P,L]
</IfModule>
And if you REALLY want to extract the hostname:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} (.*)
RewriteRule ^/old-path/(.*)$ http://%1/new-path/$1 [P,L]
</IfModule>
Since %1 references the first bracket of RewriteCond-line...
If you want customers to be rewritten to the new URI and see that:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/old-path/(.*)$ https://host-name/new-path/$1 [R=301,L]
</IfModule>
or in short, and without even using a rewrite:
RedirectMatch ^/old-path/(.*)$ /new-path/$1
To avoid 'https://host-name/' change your DocumentRoot to the parent-directory of 'old-path' and especially 'new-path'.