Apache mod_rewrite not happening on localhost - apache

Question

I can't seem to get my head around this. I just pulled down my website files from my server to work on them offline. However, my rewrite conditions are no longer working as expected.
I've been googleing for the last 3 hours and keep coming to these solutions:
put garbage in the .htaccess file to make sure it's being read. I did that and got a 500 error so it is.
Make sure mod_rewrite is enabled, and I make sure it was listed in php_info(). That's not the problem.
Other than that, I can't figure this thing out.
Here's my .htaccess. All I want to do is remove index.php from my URLs:
# Rewrite url no index.php
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}%{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}%{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . index.php
Here's my virtual host config at the moment:
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin xxxx#gmail.com
DocumentRoot "c:/wamp/www/myapp/public_html/"
<Directory "c:/wamp/www/myapp/public_html/">
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>
ServerName myapp.local
ErrorLog "logs/myapp.local"
CustomLog "logs/myapp.local" common
</VirtualHost>
I'd also like to make it known that rewrite rules seem to work a bit when they're in the virtual host config. So something like this:
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin xxx#gmail.com
DocumentRoot "c:/wamp/www/myapp/public_html/"
<Directory "c:/wamp/www/myapp/public_html/">
# use mod_rewrite for pretty URL support
RewriteEngine on
# If a directory or a file exists, use the request directly
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}%{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}%{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
# Otherwise forward the request to index.php
RewriteRule . index.php
# ...other settings...
</Directory>
ServerName myapp.local
ErrorLog "logs/myapp.local"
CustomLog "logs/myapp.local" common
</VirtualHost>
I had other problems with this though since I have nested applications (one's at / and the other at /app2/). I also seemed to have problems with the !-f condition being ignored and it would rewrite the URLs of my images and css.
Does anyone have any ideas on how to fix this? Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

You should use your code like this to remove index.php from the URL.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,}\ /index\.php(.*)\ [NC]
RewriteRule ^ %1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^.*$ index.php [L,QSA]
And then in your head section of your html add this to fix CSS problem.
<base href="http://myapp.local" />