mod_rewrite in Users/<username>/Sites directory on OSX - apache

Question

There may be a fairly simple solution to this, but I've been searching for a couple of days and can't find one, soooo...
I'm developing a website on an OS X box (Lion). The working site is hosted at /Users/username/Sites and I've added that directory to /etc/apache2/users/username.conf. I can view the pages with no problems.
BUT... I'm using CodeIgniter and I want to remove the index.php from the URL. This should be a fairly simple job for mod_rewrite. I've added an .htaccess file to the directory (and set AllowOverride All in my conf file above). After googling around I discovered that I need Options +FollowSymLinks set (I did in the .htaccess file).
The problem with this is that it appears to rewrite the URL from localhost/~username/ to /Users/username/Sites. Problem with this is that, in that form, the browser simply attempts to DOWNLOAD the index.php file, rather than executing it. This gets worse when the links are /Users//Sites/index.php/controller/function because those files don't exist... CodeIgniter is meant to take over in the index.php, but only if it is executed.
So I can't remove the Options +FollowSymLinks because that generates Access Forbidden errors, and I can't leave it in for the reasons above.
Interestingly, putting exactly the same website to the /Library/WebServer/Documents directory works fine. OS X doesn't appear to mind FollowSymLinks to that directory, probably because it is set as the DocumentRoot in httpd.conf
My httpd.conf is stock Lion, except for AllowOverride All on /Library/Webserver/Documents. mod_rewrite is enabled.
My username.conf is
<Directory "/Users/username/Sites/">
Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>
My .htaccess file in the site's directory is
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond $1 !^(index\.php|static|robots\.txt)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php/$1 [L]
Clearly, I can develop on /Library/WebServer/Documents, but would prefer to do it in my local files.

Answer 1

There is an excellent wiki page on the CodeIgniter website about mod rewrite, it covers all of the changes you need to make to your .htaccess file and the CodeIgniter files itself.
It is easy to forget changing values in your config file like the index_page from:
$config['index_page'] = "index.php";
to
$config['index_page'] = "";
The example .htaccess file shown on that wiki page is (I have removed the comments):
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^system.*
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php?/$1 [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^application.*
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php?/$1 [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?/$1 [L]
And if you find that you need to, just add the AddType and Options properties to it.

Answer 2

Here some of tricks may usefull
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /Users/username/Sites/
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond $1 !^(index\.php|static|robots\.txt)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php/$1 [L]
Also you can log rewriting log. But suggest you to remove these lines , after you fix everything
RewriteLog "/var/log/httpd/rewrite_log"
RewriteLogLevel 9