I am not using Virtual Hosts or anything fancy though I have some .htaccess files setup. Following is my rewrite rule in httpd.conf:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/app/smsapi [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) https://www.example.com/uri=%{REQUEST_URI} [R,L]
This rule basically says that if the uri does not begin with /app/smsapi then fire the rewrite. But when I restart the server and try it I get some weird results.
When I request the URL https://www.example.com/app/smsapi/index.php, I get a 200 Success code which is as expected. But, when I request the URL http://www.example.com/app/smsapi/index.php, it redirects to https://www.example.com/uri=/app/smsapi/index.php. So it actually fires the rule even though the request URI does not satisfy the condition.
So, then I decided to turn off the rewrite rules and give it a go. Now, both those URL give me a 200 Success code.
Now, I know this problem cannot be solved easily by other people who do not have access to the server, but am I right in saying that this is certainly a problem with REQUEST_URI not firing correctly? I have shown that without the rewrite rule, everything works normally, but with the rewrite rule, the second URL is redirected. Therefore, the redirection must be caused by the rewrite rule? Additionally, the condition for redirect rule is not satisfied. Doesn't this prove that there is something wrong with the functioning of the rewrite rule?
Is there any other possibility?
UPDATE
Something very weird is happening here. I setup a local server and tried the same rule and what I got for the URL http://192.168.0.112/app/ is
http://192.168.0.112/uri=/uri=/uri=/uri=/uri=/uri=/uri=/uri=/uri=/uri=/uri=/uri=/uri=/uri=/uri=/uri=/uri=/uri=/uri=/uri=/uri=/app/
which is correct because as long as the URL is not like /app/smsapi, it should redirect it. Wonder why this is not happening on the real server. Also, where you insert these rules seems to make a difference. (I am only including these rules after the LoadModule command).
On localhost, if I put these rules either above or below the Directory section, it won't work. But, if I include it inside the Directory section it will.
On server, if I include the rules inside the Directory section, they won't work. But, if I include them either above or below the Directory section, they start working.
This seems to me to be due to a difference in the versions. My localhost is an Ubuntu Desktop 16.04 running Apache 2.4.18. While the server is CentOS 6.8 running Apache 2.2.15.
But, i think the mystery as to why on the server redirect happens only once (though it is configured to go upto 20 times) has something to do with https. Which is also related to the original problem in which https is redirected even on a non-matching rule.
Clues anyone?
UPDATE
I updated the httpd.conf file with the same rules but I used http:// instead of https:// and it gave me the correct result with 20 redirects. That means I have isolated the problem to https.
You are reporting the exact issue in the first phrase: "I am not using Virtual Hosts or anything fancy though I have some .htaccess files setup"
.htaccess is "fancy" and overcomplicated, not virtualhosts.
If you had defined that RewriteCond in virtualhost in the first place it would work, but .htaccess is per-dir context (aka a nightmare) and the regex ^/ will never match in that context.
If you want to match REQUEST_URI in per-dir context (directory or .htaccess) you need to drop the initial slash, that is:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^app/smsapi [NC]
Extra, also consider you MAY NOT need to add a RewriteCond for this:
RewriteRule ^(?!app/smsapi)(.*) https://www.example.com/uri=$1 [R,L]
Related
I'd like to use RewriteRule's pattern to get the path requested and redirect the client elsewhere keeping the path in the resulting redirect.
I thought something like this would do the trick:
RewriteRule. ^(.*)$ http://testserver/test/$1
If the user requests foo, send him to test/foo (don't worry about looping, I put some RewriteCond logic to prevent that).
To my surprise, Apache ends up with something like http://testserver/foo/var/www/html. What it did was the following:
/bar /var/www/html/bar
I raised the log level of mod_rewrite and found out it did the match, but Apache was expand matching the local path of /, which is /var/www/html and using that to redirect the browser, which won't surely work.
I tried using [PT] which I thought would prevent the expansion, but it didn't.
Any idea on how can I prevent it from happening. Any help would be appreciated.
Best
I am trying to do a 301 redirect with lightspeed webserver htaccess with no luck.
I need to do a url to url redirect without any related parameters.
for example:
from: http://www.example.com/?cat=123
to: http://www.example.com/some_url
I have tried:
RewriteRule http://www.example.com/?cat=123 http://www.example.com/some_url/ [R=301,L,NC]
Any help will be appreciated.
Thanks for adding your code to your question. Once more we see how important that is:
your issue is that a RewriteRule does not operate on URLs, but on paths. So you need something like that instead:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/?$ /some_url/ [R=301,L,NC,QSD]
From your question it is not clear if you want to ignore any GET parameters or if you only want to redirect if certain parameters are set. So here is a variant that will only get applied if some parameter is actually set in the request:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (?:^|&)cat=123(?:&|$)
RewriteRule ^/?$ /some_url/ [R=301,L,NC,QSD]
Another thing that does not really get clear is if you want all URLs below http://www.example.com/ (so below the path /) to be rewritten, or only that exact URL. If you want to keep any potential further path component of a request and still rewrite (for example http://www.example.com/foo => http://www.example.com/some_url/foo), then you need to add a capture in your regular expression and reuse the captured path components:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/?(.*)$ /some_url/$1 [R=301,L,NC,QSD]
For either of this to work you need to have the interpretation of .htaccess style files enabled by means of the AllowOverride command. See the official documentation of the rewriting module for details. And you have to take care that that -htaccess style file is actually readable by the http server process and that it is located right inside the http hosts DOCUMENT_ROOT folder in the local file system.
And a general hint: you should always prefer to place such rules inside the http servers host configuration instead of using .htaccess style files. Those files are notoriously error prone, hard to debug and they really slow down the server. They are only provided as a last option for situations where you do not have control over the host configuration (read: really cheap hosting service providers) or if you have an application that relies on writing its own rewrite rules (which is an obvious security nightmare).
I'm working on an apache server (2.2), and I'm trying to redirect a URL based off of a URL filter. For example,
https://mywebsite.com/path/to/page?folder=folderDirectory/folderName
will redirect to:
https://mywebsite.com/static/contentUnavailable.html
In my httpd.conf file I have the following code ..
RedirectMatch (.*)path/to/page?folder=folderDirectory/folderName /static/contentUnavailable.html
I restart apache everytime I make modifications to this file, however the page is not redirecting. What am I doing wrong in the RedirectMatch?
You can't match query string with a redirectmatch, sorry, you need mod_rewrite for this and using a RewriteCond. Rough example:
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^folder
RewriteRule ^ /static/contentUnavailable.html [R,L,QSD]
This will match a query string that starts with folder (and continues with whatever else, no matter what it is). and redirect everything to the destination you want, discarding the query string in the process (QSD flag).
In any case let me commend you for trying to stick to redirect/redirectmatch first (while everyone else just goes blindly for mod_rewrite even for the simplest redirects). You are doing things right.
I'm having some difficulty with a super simple htaccess redirect.
All I want to do is rewrite absolutely everything, except a couple files.
htaccess looks like this:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !sitemap
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !robots
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.com/$1 [L,R=301]
The part that works is that everything gets redirected to new domain as it should be. And I can also access robots.txt without being forwarded, but not with sitemap.xml. If I try to go to sitemap.xml, the domain forwards along anyway and opens the sitemap file on the new domain.
I have this exact same issue when trying to "ignore" index.html. I can ignore robots, I can ignore alternate html or php files, but if I want to ignore index.html, the regex fails.
Since I can't actually SEE what is in the REQUEST_URI variable, my guess is that somehow index.html and sitemap.xml are some kind of "special" files that don't end up in REQUEST_URI? I know this because of a stupid test. If I choose to ignore index.html like this:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !index.html
Then if I type example.com/index.html I will be forwarded. But if I just type example.com/ the ignore actually works and it shows the content of index.html without forwarding!
How is it that when I choose to ignore the regex "index.html", it only works when "index.html" is not actually typed in the address bar!?!
And it gets even weirder! Should I type something like example.com/index.html?option=value, then the ignore rule works and I do NOT get forwarded when there are attributes like this. But index.html by itself doesn't work, and then just having the slash root, the rule works again.
I'm completely confused! Why does it seem like REQUEST_URI is not able to see some filenames like index.html and sitemap.xml? I've been Googling for 2 days and not only can I not find out if this is true, but I can't seem to find any websites which actually give examples of what these htaccess server variables actually contain!
Thanks!
my guess is that somehow index.html and sitemap.xml are some kind of "special" files that don't end up in REQUEST_URI?
This is not true. There is no such special treatment of any requested URL. The REQUEST_URI server variable contains the URL-path (only) of the request. This notably excludes the scheme + hostname and any query string (which are available in their own variables).
However, if there are any other mod_rewrite directives that precede this (including the server config) that rewrite the URL then the REQUEST_URI server variable is also updated to reflect the rewritten URL.
index.html (Directory Index)
index.html is possibly a special case. Although, if you are explicitly requesting index.html as part of the URL itself (as you appear to be doing) then this does not apply.
If, on the other hand, you are requesting a directory, eg. http://example.com/subdir/ and relying on mod_dir issuing an internal subrequest for the directory index (ie. index.html), then the REQUEST_URI variable may or may not contain index.html - depending on the version of Apache (2.2 vs 2.4) you are on. On Apache 2.2 mod_dir executes first, so you would need to check for /subdir/index.html. However, on Apache 2.4, mod_rewrite executes first, so you simply check for the requested URL: /subdir/. It's safer to check for both, particularly if you have other rewrites and there is possibility of a second pass through the rewrite engine.
Caching problems
However, the most probable cause in this scenario is simply a caching issue. If the 301 redirect has previously been in place without these exceptions then it's possible these redirections have been cached by the browser. 301 (permanent) redirects are cached persistently by the browser and can cause issues with testing (as well as your users that also have these redirects cached - there is little you can do about that unfortunately).
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(sitemap|index|alternate|alt) [NC]
RewriteRule .* alternate.html [R,L]
The example you presented in comments further suggests a caching issue, since you are now getting different results for sitemap than those posted in your question. (It appears to be working as intended in your second example).
Examining Apache server variables
#zzzaaabbb mentioned one method to examine the value of the Apache server variable. (Note that the Apache server variable REQUEST_URI is different to the PHP variable of the same name.) You can also assign the value of an Apache server variable to an environment variable, which is then readable in your application code.
For example:
RewriteRule ^ - [E=APACHE_REQUEST_URI:%{REQUEST_URI}]
You can then examine the value of the APACHE_REQUEST_URI environment variable in your server-side code. Note that if you have any other rewrites that result in the rewritting process to start over then you could get multiple env vars, each prefixed with REDIRECT_.
With the index.html problem, you probably just need to escape the dot (index\.html). You are in the regex pattern-matching area on the right-hand side of RewriteCond. With the un-escaped dot in there, there would need to be a character at that spot in the request, to match, and there isn't, so you're not matching and are getting the unwanted forward.
For the sitemap not matching problem, you could check to see what REQUEST_URI actually contains, by just creating an empty dummy file (to avoid 404 throwing) and then do a redirect at top of .htaccess. Then, in browser URL, type in anything you want to see the REQUEST_URI for -- it will show in address bar.
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$
RewriteRule ^ /test.php?var=%{REQUEST_URI} [NE,R,L]
Credit MrWhite with that easy test method.
Hopefully that will show that sitemap in URL ends up as something else, so will at least partially explain why it's not pattern-matching and preventing redirect, when it should be pattern-matching and preventing redirect.
I would also test by being sure that the server isn't stepping in front of things with custom 301 directive that for whatever reason makes sitemap behave unexpectedly. Put this at the top of your .htaccess for that test.
ErrorDocument 301 default
I have a .htaccess rewrite condition / rule, which works fine on my local, which is OSX mavericks, running apache Apache/2.2.26, but when I deploy to my production server it no longer works, running Apache/2.2.22 (Debian).
this is the condition:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^([a-z]{2})/sitemap.xml$
RewriteRule ^([a-z]{2})/sitemap.xml /sitemaps/$1_sitemap.xml [NC,L]
As you can see, I have a directory for sitemaps in the base directory, and this being a multi-lingual site, I have a sitemap for each language. However I cannot simply create a directory like /en/sitemap.xml for each one, as this effects how the framework deals with the request, as apache trys to serve the directory, rather than passing it to the index file to be handled.
So i create this rewrite condition, which should rewrite the request /en/sitemap.xml to /sitemaps/en_sitemap.xml and as stated, this works great locally, but not on my Debian server, it never matches that regex from the request, it just moves onto the next one and passes the request to the index.php file.. which is wrong!
Any advice / help would be great, I cannot find anything in apache docs referring to mod_rewrite under these 2 versions that may be different.
Thanks
That's because %{REQUEST_URI} value always begins with a leading slash.
Also, your condition is useless since your RewriteRule does the same.
This code should work as expected on both sides
RewriteRule ^([a-z]{2})/sitemap\.xml$ /sitemaps/$1_sitemap.xml [L]