Url rewrite is not working in some cases with XAMPP in Windows 7 - apache

Question

I have a PHP website hosted at localhost on my Windows 7 PC, running XAMPP 1.8.2.
And I have rewrite rules as below:
Options -Indexes +FollowSymLinks
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php?rt=$1 [QSA,L]
</IfModule>
To rewrite the URL so it will always go into something like: http://mysite.com/index.php?rt=[controller]/[action]/[params]
It works prefect until I found it failed when processing url like: http://mysite.com/error/xxx. It returns a 404 status other than goes to http://mysite.com/index.php?rt=error/xxx. (I do NOT have an sub directory call error/ under my website root folder)
I carefully checked my PHP code and I am sure it is not the cause, and I upload my website to a remote server and everything is fine. So I am pretty sure something is not properly configured in my XAMPP (Apache), that makes the /error/xxx request was treated differently.
Also I found visiting http://mysite.com/error/ gives me 403 but http://mysite.com/[something_else]/ is fine.
Just in case, I paste my vhost.conf here as well:
<VirtualHost *:80>
DocumentRoot "/xampp/htdocs"
ServerName localhost
</VirtualHost>
<VirtualHost *:80>
DocumentRoot "E:\htdocs\mysite.dev"
ServerName mysite.dev
</VirtualHost>
And related httpd.conf:
<Directory "E:\htdocs">
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks Includes ExecCGI
AllowOverride All
Require all granted
</Directory>
Any help is appreciated!

Answer 1

Finally figure it out after wasting another hour on it!
There is configuration file called httpd-multilang-errordoc.conf under /xampp/apache/conf/extra, and inside it's something like this:
<IfModule alias_module>
<IfModule include_module>
<IfModule negotiation_module>
Alias /error/ "C:/xampp/apache/error/"
<Directory "C:/xampp/apache/error">
AllowOverride None
Options IncludesNoExec
AddOutputFilter Includes html
AddHandler type-map var
Require all granted
LanguagePriority en cs de es fr it ja ko nl pl pt-br ro sv tr
ForceLanguagePriority Prefer Fallback
</Directory>
ErrorDocument 400 /error/HTTP_BAD_REQUEST.html.var
ErrorDocument 401 /error/HTTP_UNAUTHORIZED.html.var
ErrorDocument 403 /error/HTTP_FORBIDDEN.html.var
ErrorDocument 404 /error/HTTP_NOT_FOUND.html.var
ErrorDocument 405 /error/HTTP_METHOD_NOT_ALLOWED.html.var
ErrorDocument 408 /error/HTTP_REQUEST_TIME_OUT.html.var
ErrorDocument 410 /error/HTTP_GONE.html.var
ErrorDocument 411 /error/HTTP_LENGTH_REQUIRED.html.var
ErrorDocument 412 /error/HTTP_PRECONDITION_FAILED.html.var
ErrorDocument 413 /error/HTTP_REQUEST_ENTITY_TOO_LARGE.html.var
ErrorDocument 414 /error/HTTP_REQUEST_URI_TOO_LARGE.html.var
ErrorDocument 415 /error/HTTP_UNSUPPORTED_MEDIA_TYPE.html.var
ErrorDocument 500 /error/HTTP_INTERNAL_SERVER_ERROR.html.var
ErrorDocument 501 /error/HTTP_NOT_IMPLEMENTED.html.var
ErrorDocument 502 /error/HTTP_BAD_GATEWAY.html.var
ErrorDocument 503 /error/HTTP_SERVICE_UNAVAILABLE.html.var
ErrorDocument 506 /error/HTTP_VARIANT_ALSO_VARIES.html.var
</IfModule>
</IfModule>
</IfModule>
The line Alias /error/ "C:/xampp/apache/error/" handles all the request matches domainname.com/error/ and rewrite it to C:/xampp/apache/error/.
Simply commenting out the line solves my problem. Not sure what it does but make things done.

Answer 2

From your last comment it sounds like Apache isn't even correctly configured to the path with your site!
You need to edit the Xampp\apache\conf\httpd.conf file.
First make a BACKUP copy of it.
Edit the line that starts with...
DocumentRoot "
..if it is a Windows machine and it uses / instead of \ retain those.
Then you need to edit the line that starts with...
<Directory "
Be aware that there is also a CGI version of this.
If you have correctly edited the file save and then restart Apache. Changes will NOT take effect until you restart Apache.