Rewrite rules for CMS fail after installing ssl certificate - apache

Question

I wrote a content management system that uses rewrite rules to map urls to controller, action and argument query strings.
I use two .htaccess files. One is in my site's root directory. This one forwards all requests to a sub directory, which depends on the domain name used for the request:
SetEnv HTTP_MOD_REWRITE On
RewriteEngine on
# mapp requests that don't start with www to https://www
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]
# BEGIN Domain to folder mapping
########################
# pointing example.com to subfolder 'example'
ReWriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} (www\.)?example.com
ReWriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !example/
ReWriteRule ^(.*)$ example/$1 [L]
# END Domain to folder mapping
A second .htaccess file that maps the request to the actual query string is in the subdirectory that gets mapped to in the first rewrite step:
SetEnv HTTP_MOD_REWRITE On
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ([^/]*)([/]*)([^/]*)([/]*)(.*) index.php?controller=$1&action=$3&args=$3 [L,QSA]
The result of all this, before I installed my ssl certificates, was that a request that looks like this:
example.com/hello/foo/123
would map to:
http://www.example.com?controller=hello&action=foo&args=123
Now I just get sent to the index file. If I enter the actual query string, I get the correct result.
I looked through my server's rewrite logs and it looks like there is an additional rewrite step that gets executed without me being able to figure out why. I think this is the relevant stuff from the rewrite logs:
[rewrite:trace3] [www.example.com/sid#8021c1788][rid#807418748/initial/redir#1] [perdir /fs6c/example/public/example/] strip per-dir prefix: /fs6c/example/public/example/hello -> hello
[rewrite:trace3] [www.example.com/sid#8021c1788][rid#807418748/initial/redir#1] [perdir /fs6c/example/public/example/] applying pattern '([^/]*)([/]*)([^/]*)([/]*)(.*)' to uri 'hello'
[rewrite:trace2] [www.example.com/sid#8021c1788][rid#807418748/initial/redir#1] [perdir /fs6c/example/public/example/] rewrite 'hello' -> 'index.php?controller=hello&action=&args='
[rewrite:trace3] [www.example.com/sid#8021c1788][rid#807418748/initial/redir#1] split uri=index.php?controller=hello&action=&args= -> uri=index.php, args=controller=hello&action=&args=
I am assuming the [L] flag is the culprit, but I don't understand why this wasn't an issue before I switched to ssl.
I am using a shared hosting service, and they had to install the certificates for me, since they don't expose the necessary parts of the server to the user.

Answer 1

I still don't know WHY this is happening, but I was able to find a way to make it work with the ssl certificate. These are the relevant rewrite rules in the htaccess file located in the root directory:
# for existing files, redirect to subdirectory
ReWriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?example.com
ReWriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !example/
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/example/$1 -f
ReWriteRule ^(.*) example/$1 [L]
# for non-existing files, map to index.php with CMS arguments
ReWriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?example.com
# file exists, but is index.php
ReWriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} index.php [OR]
# file doesn't exist
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
ReWriteRule ^([^/]*)([/]*)([^/]*)([/]*)(.*) example/index.php?controller=$1&action=$3&args=$5 [L,QSA]
I eliminated the second htaccess file.
I hope this helps someone in the future. The hosting provider is NearlyFreeSpeech. If anyone has any clue why my old rules didn't work, I would really appreciate to know!