htaccess on Localhost refers to root, not folder - apache

I am working on a website to make the URL's more SEO friendly with the htaccess, however, i bump into a problem when I set up the htaccess file. If I use the URLs I prefer to setup, i get refered back to the localhost and not towards the development map I am working in, so in this case, i get refered back to localhost/blog for example instead of localhost/jellyfish_rework/blog, so I end up with a view from my localhostor simply an error in the page.
The original link was http://localhost/jellyfish_rework/index.php?p=blog
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /jellyfish_rework/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^([^/]*)$ /?p=$1 [L]]
Does this have to do with the fact my anchors refer to <a href"/blog"></a>? Cause in the other anchor tags that I still refer to in the old way, I dont get the responds back I want (so the link stays http://localhost/jellyfish_rework/index.php?p=blog)
edit
the htaccess file is located in the localhost/jellyfish_rework/ as that is where the index file is.

Your last line (RewriteRule) should look like this
RewriteRule ^([^/]*)$ index.php?p=$1 [L]
Don't add a leading slash before.
Otherwise it will be like an absolute path (/index.php from root).
With the rule above and your RewriteBase, this rule will act this way:
If not existing file/folder then rewrite it to /jellyfish_rework/index.php?p=URI
Your old rule (with leading slash) was about:
If not existing file/folder then rewrite it to /index.php?p=URI
Note: since you're using relative paths, you must also change all your html links (css, javascript, images, links) with a leading /jellyfish_rework/ or use the base tag
<base href="/jellyfish_rework/">

Related

Why is Apache RewriteRule's result seen only by part of the server functions?

My website uses a single index.php that, while using a single header, include a different .php file for each different section of the main page.
index.php?t=animals will display a page about animals (with include animals.php in some point of the script).
index.php?t=plants will display a page about plants, and so on.
However, I want the user to see website/animals and website/plants, so I'm using the following rule on .htaccess:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^/?([^/]+)/?$ /index.php?t=$1 [L]
This should internally (i.e. invisible to the user) translate, for instance, website/animals into website/index.php?t=animals. It's working, because PHP recognizes the t variable and includes the correct file (even though $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] is returning /animals and not /index.php?t=animals.
So a problem arises if the user writes website/animals/, with a trailing slash, because now many links on the page brake, because they were relative to the root website/, not to the animals directory.
How can I make everything in the server see /index.php?t=animals, i.e. the result of Apache RewriteRule? Or will I have to change every link, including a leading slash representing the root?

Why isn't this rewrite rule catching?

I have a website with a bunch of assets using absolute paths, ie:
<img src=\"/_files/images/shell/logo.jpg\">
My issue is, the url for this site in development is: http://arraybox.net/~hazelwoodconstru/
Unfortunately, this means it is trying to access the files at arraybox.net/_files/images/shell/logo.jpg instead of arraybox.net/~hazelwoodconstru/_files/images/shell/logo.jpg
I'm trying to handle this with an .htaccess RewriteRule.
RewriteRule /_files/(.*) /~hazelwoodconstru/_files/$1 [R,NC,L]
I had it working at some point, but I messed around with it, and now it's broken and I can't figure out why!
EDIT:
I also have the following in this .htaccess which may or may not be interfering:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !404\.shtml|500\.shtml|favicon\.ico|index\.php{1}
RewriteRule (.*) /~hazelwoodconstru/ [QSA,L]
You need to make the rule's matching more strict, as well as removing the leading slash:
RewriteRule ^_files/ /~hazelwoodconstru/%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R]
Remove the ,R flag if you don't want an external redirect.
What seems to be happening is that the absolute file paths just plain old won't use arraybox.net/~hazelwoodconstru/filepath - they go straight to arraybox.net/filepath. Writing the .htaccess on the main directory arraybox.net won't work for me, because there will be multiple sites using this setup, and there is no way to tell which /home/ directory the assets really live in.
The solution I went with:
Instead of using the user directory arraybox.net/~hazelwoodconstru, I set up a subdomain
hazelwood.arraybox.net.
I then edited the vhosts config to change the document root for this subdomain to point to the /home/hazelwoodconstru directory (I also had to change the user).
Additionally I had to modify vhosts.local to change phpopenbasedirprotect to use documentroot. Then I had to add allow from all on the /home/ directory.
It's now working on the subdomain.

In Apache, how do I redirect from a specific path and query string?

I want to redirect from, e.g.,
http://mystore.com/category.php?id=123
to
http://mystore.com/categories/foo
and also from, e.g.,
http://mystore.com/product.php?id=456
to
http://mystore.com/products/bar
These will be permanent (301) redirects and there will be about a dozen of them. I don't need to extract any information from the paths or query strings, I just need to match them exactly. And I would like avoid specifying absolute URLs if at all possible.
I figure this can be done with mod_rewrite and some combination of RewriteConds and RewriteRules, but I'm already doing some URL rewriting and my attempts so far have had undesired results.
Here's an anonymised excerpt from my .htaccess file before any modifications:
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule sitemap.xml index.php?route=sitemap [L]
# skip files and directories
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^([^?]*) index.php?route=$1 [L,QSA]
This works as intended. I've tried adding several different combinations of conditions and rules just before the last line, most recently
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} id=123
RewriteRule category.php categories/foo [L,R=301]
Something about that last rule causes problems. The home page loads, but style sheets, images, and other resources do not.
At this point, I'm considering just creating PHP scripts named category.php and product.php to handle the redirects.... Am I just a few characters away from the solution?
The resources (styles sheets, images etc.) are not loaded because there might be relative paths which have become invalid.
The problem is that the browser considers "categories" to be a folder and so the path to the resources is not valid.
A quick fix (if you are running on a domain/subdomain and not in a folder) is to put / in the path of all your resources.
For example: change style.css to /style.css so it is still included when you are on the categories page.
I never did figure out the problem, but I solved it by changing the order of the directives and nothing else. I moved the new redirects to just after the RewriteBase directive and everything works perfectly.

How to do a mod_rewrite redirection to relative URL

I am trying to achieve a basic URL redirection for pretty-URLs, and due to images, CSS etc. also residing in the same path I need to make sure that if the URL is accessed without a trailing slash, it is added automatically.
This works fine if I put the absolute URL like this:
RewriteRule ^myParentDir/([A-Z0-9_-]+)$ http://www.mydomain.com/myParentDir/$1/ [R,nc,L]
But if I change this to a relative URL, so that I don't have to change it each time I move things in folders, this simply doesn't work.
These are what I tried and all do not work, or redirect me to the actual internal directory path of the server like /public_html/... :
RewriteRule ^myParentDir/([A-Z0-9_-]+)$ ./myParentDir/$1/ [R,nc,L]
RewriteRule ^myParentDir/([A-Z0-9_-]+)$ myParentDir/$1/ [R,nc,L]
What is the right way to do a URL redirection so that if the user enters something like:
http://www.mydomain.com/somedir/myVirtualParentDir/myVirtualSubdir
he gets redirected to (via HTTP 301 or 302):
http://www.mydomain.com/somedir/myVirtualParentDir/myVirtualSubdir/
Thanks.
EDIT: Adding some more details because it does not seem to be clear.
Lets say I am implementing a gallery, and I want to have pretty URLs using mod_rewrite.
So, I would like to have URLs as follows:
http://www.mydomain.com/somedir/galleries/cats
which shows thumbnails of cats, while:
http://www.mydomain.com/somedir/galleries/cats/persian
which shows one image from the thumbnails of all cats, named persian.
So in actual fact the physical directory structure and rewriting would be as follows:
http://www.domain.com/somedir/gallery.php?category=cats&image=persian
So what I want to do is put a .htaccess file in /somedir which catches all requests made to /galleries and depending on the virtual subdirectories following it, use them as placeholders in the rewriting, with 2 rewrite rules:
RewriteRule ^galleries/(A-Z0-9_-]+)/$ ./gallery.php?category=$1 [nc]
RewriteRule ^galleries/(A-Z0-9_-]+)/+([A-Z0-9_-]+)$ ./gallery.php?category=$1&image=$2 [nc]
Now the problem is that the gallery script in fact needs some CSS, Javascript and Images, located at http://www.domain.com/somedir/css, http://www.domain.com/somedir/js, and http://www.domain.com/somedir/images respectively.
I don't want to hardcode any absolute URLs, so the CSS, JS and Images will be referred to using relative URLs, (./css, ./js, ./images etc.). So I can do rewriting URLs as follows:
RewriteRule ^galleries/[A-Z0-9_-]+/css/(.*)$ ./css/$1 [nc]
The problem is that since http://www.domain.com/somedir/galleries/cats is a virtual directory, the above only works if the user types:
http://www.domain.com/somedir/gallaries/cats/
If the user omits the trailing slash mod_dir will not add it because in actual fact this directory does not actually exist.
If I put a redirect rewrite with the absolute URL it works:
RewriteRule ^galleries/([A-Z0-9_-]+)$ http://www.mydomain.com/subdir/galleries/$1/ [R,nc,L]
But I don't want to have the URL prefix hardcoded because I want to be able to put this on whatever domain I want in whatever subdir I want, so I tried this:
RewriteRule ^galleries/([A-Z0-9_-]+)$ galleries/$1/ [R,nc,L]
But instead it redirects to:
http://www.mydomain.com/home/myaccount/public_html/subdir/galleries/theRest
which obviously is not what I want.
EDIT: Further clarifications
The solution I am looking for is to avoid hardcoding the domain name or folder paths in .htaccess. I am looking for a solution where if I package the .htaccess with the rest of the scripts and resources, wherever the user unzips it on his web server it works out of the box. All works like that apart from this trailing slash issue.
So any solution which involves hardcoding the parent directory or the webserver's path in .htaccess in any way is not what I am looking for.
Here's a solution straight from the Apache Documentation (under "Trailing Slash Problem"):
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule ^(.+[^/])$ $1/ [R]
Here's a solution that tests the REQUEST_URI for a trailing slash, then adds it:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(/$|\.)
RewriteRule (.+) http://www.example.com/$1/ [R=301,L]
Here's another solution that allows you to exempt certain REQUEST_URI patterns:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !example.php
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.*)/$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/$1/ [L,R=301]
Hope these help. :)
This rule should add a trailing slash to any URL which is not a real file/directory (which is, I believe, what you need since Apache usually does the redirect automatically for existing directories).
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.+[^/])$ $1/ [L,R=301]
Edit:
In order to prevent Apache from appending the path relative to the document root, you have to use RewriteBase. So, for instance, in the folder meant to be your application's root, you add the following, which overrides the physical path:
RewriteBase /
This might work:
RewriteRule ^myParentDir/[A-Z0-9_-]+$ %{REQUEST_URI}/ [NS,L,R=301]
However, I'm not sure why you think you need this at all. Just make your CSS / JS / image file rewrite rule look something like this:
RewriteRule ^galleries/([A-Za-z0-9_-]+/)*(css|js|images)/(.*)$ ./$2/$3
and everything should work just fine regardless of whether the browser requests /somedir/galleries/css/whatever.css or /somedir/galleries/cats/css/whatever.css or even /somedir/galleries/cats/persian/calico/css/whatever.css.
Ps. One problem with this rule is that it prevents you from having any galleries names "css", "js" or "images". You might want to fix that by naming those virtual directories something like ".css", ".js" and ".images", or using some other naming scheme that doesn't conflict with valid gallery names.
I'm not sure I complelty understand your problem.
The trailing slash redirection is done automatically on most Apache installation because of mod_dir module (99% of chance you'have the mod_dir module).
You may need to add:
DirectorySlash On
But it's the default value.
So. If you access foo/bar and bar is not a file in foo directory but a subdirectory then mod_dir performs the redirection to foo/bar/.
The only thing I known that could break this is the Option Multiviews which is maybe trying to fin a bar.php, bar.php, bar.a-mime-extension-knwon-by-apache in the directory. So you could try to add:
Option -Multiviews
And remove all rewriteRules. If you do not get this default Apache behavior you'll maybe have to look at mod-rewrite, but it's like using a nuclear bomb to kill a spider. Nuclear bombs may get quite touchy to use well.
EDIT:
For the trailing slash problem with mod-rewrite you can check this documentation howto, stating this should work:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /myParentDir/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule ^(.+[^/])$ $1/ [R]

.htaccess mod_rewrite issue

Almost in any project I work on, some issues with .htaccess occur. I usually just find the easiest solution and leave it because I don't have any knowledge or understanding for Apache, servers etc. But this time I thought I would ask you guys.
This is the files and folders in my (simplified) setup:
/modrewrite-test
.htaccess
/config
/inc
/lib
/public_html
.htaccess
/cms
/navigation
index.php
edit.php
/pages
index.php
edit.php
login.php
page.php
The "config", "inc" and "lib" folders are meant to be "hidden" from the root of the website. I try to accomplish this by making a .htaccess-file in the root that redirects the user to "public_html". The .htacess-file contains this:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule (.*) public_html/$1
This works perfect. If I type "http://localhost/modrewrite-test/login.php" in my browser, I end up in public_html/login.php which is my intention. So this works fine. The .htaccess-file in "public_html" contains this:
RewriteEngine On
# Root
RewriteRule ^$ page.php [L]
# Login
RewriteRule ^(admin)|(login)\/?$ login.php [L]
# Page (if not a file/directory)
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ page.php?url=$1 [L]
The first rewrite just redirects me to public_html/page.php if I try to reach "http://localhost/modrewrite-test/". The next rewrite is just for the convenience of users trying to log in - so if they try to reach "http://localhost/modrewrite-test/admin" or "http://localhost/modrewrite-test/login" they will end up at the login.php-file. The third and last rewrite handles the rest of the requests. If I try to reach "http://localhost/modrewrite-test/bla/bla/bla" it will just redirect me to public_html/page.php (with the 'url' GET-variable set) instead of finding a folder called "la", containing a folder named "bla" and etc.
All of these things work perfect but a minor issues occurs when I for instance try to reach "http://localhost/modrewrite-test/cms/navigation" without a slash at the end of the URL. When I try to reach that page the browser is somehow redirected to "http://localhost/modrewrite-test/public_html/cms/navigation/". The correct page is shown but why does it get redirected and add the "public_html" part in the URL? The desired behavior is that the URL stays intact and that the page public_html/cms/navigation/index.php is shown.
The files and folders in the (simplified) can be found at http://highbars.com/modrewrite-test.zip
I ran into the same problem with "strange" redirects when trying to access existing directory without slash at end. In my case this redirection was done by mod_dir Apache module. To disable redirection I used DirectorySlash directive. Try putting in .htaccess files following string:
DirectorySlash Off
RewriteBase may help. Try this in public_html/.htaccess:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
Add the following to /modrewrite-test/.htaccess:
RewriteBase /modrewrite-test
Just to be on the safe side, I'd add the same rule also to /modrewrite-test/public_html/.htaccess. I found that having RewriteBase always set prevents a lot of potential problems in the future. This however means that you might need to update the values if you change the URI structure of your site.
Update:
I don't think that this is possible with your current folder structure. I believe that the problem is that existing subdirectories prevent rewrite rules from firing. Note the behavior please - everything works fine while you are working with non-existent files and directories, thanks to these two conditions:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
However if you try to open any index file from an existing subdirectory, you get redirected to .../public_html/.... Since you can properly open /modrewrite-test/cms/navigation/edit.php, I can only assume that the request is being overwritten by some Apache core directive, which adds slashes at end of folder URLs. Notice that everything works fine if you have an ending-slash at each URL (i.e. the Apache core directory does not need to "correct" your URL, thus everything gets rewritten by your own rewrite rules).
Suggested solution (unless anyone can advise better):
Change /modrewrite-test/public_html/.htaccess as follows:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /modrewrite-test
# Page (if not a file/directory)
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ page.php?url=$1 [L]
Then Remove all PHP files from subfolders and use the Front Controller pattern, i.e. route all requests through your main page.php file and do not delegate anything down below.
You can then use the Factory pattern to initiate individual UIs (i.e. navigation/edit.php) directly from your main page.php file based on contents of $_GET['url'] (make sure to properly sanitize that).
Update #2:
This other post on StackOverflow advises on project structure used by Zend Framework - it essentially shows the approach which I suggested above. It is a valuable information asset regardless if you use Zend Framework or not.