RewriteCond breaking the RewriteRule for no apparent reason - apache

I've just started playing with mod_rewrite and I'm trying to forward all requests to old html file to go to php files instead.
Here's the .htaccess contents:
RewriteCond $1.php -f
RewriteCond $1.html !-f
RewriteRule ^(.*).html$ $1.php
The problem is it doesn't work when I type in a url to a html page, I get a 404. Nothing in the error logs of Apache, just the 404 in the access log. It should redirect to the php.
Now, the index.php does exist and I can go to that directly and the old index.html file doesn't exist.
Yet, if I comment out the line
RewriteCond $1.php -f
It all works fine, i.e. it forwards my index.html requests to index.php.
Any ideas why? The -f should test that the 'file exists' and $1 should be 'the file', I think?
By the way, does anyone have a good, friendly mod_rewrite tutorial they'd recommend?

In .htaccess you need not use ^ and $. All the rules apply to the urls relative to the current directory.

Related

How to redirect any URL to my index.html using apache?

I want my website to point at my index.html no matter what the URL is.
http://localhost/WebsiteName/
http://localhost/WebsiteName/whatever
http://localhost/WebsiteName/whatever/whatever-1/whatever-2/whatever-3/etc
By using this rewrite code in my apache config:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule . index.html [L]
My URL works correctly when URL is any of these:
http://localhost/WebsiteName/
http://localhost/WebsiteName/whatever
But breaks when it is like this or further extended:
http://localhost/WebsiteName/whatever/
http://localhost/WebsiteName/whatever/whatever-1/whatever-2/whatever-3/etc
It acts as if there was another folder "whatever" in the directory whenever I use one of the URLs that break.
I don't want the URL to change, I just want it to point at my index.html no matter what it is.
Based off what you have there, all of those url's should go to your index.html. The index.html is assumed to be at the DOCUMENT_ROOT.
I'm not sure what your problem is, but maybe instead of having a condition for rewriting non-files. Stop rewriting when it's a file. I notice any changes on my website, with either config, but maybe it can work for yours.
RewriteEngine on
### If a uri leads to an actual file or directory (presumably with it's own index.html), then don't rewrite any further
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}%{REQUEST_URI} -f [OR]
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}%{REQUEST_URI} -d
RewriteRule ^ - [L]
### everything else
RewriteRule . /index.html [L]

Apache Mod_Rewrite Seems to be Causing Javascript Reloads

I'm setting up URL rewrite rules for an application I'm developing so that I can use nice clean URLs. I want the URLs to look like http://app.com/page/agency/ and to be equivalent to http://app.com/index.php?p=page&agency=agency. The agency selector is optional, so I want the URLs to redirect, even if the agency is not present. I have created the following mod_rewrite rules for this purpose:
RewriteRule ^/?([a-z]+)/$ /index.php?p=$1 [PT]
RewriteRule ^/?([a-z]+)/([a-z]+)/$ /index.php?p=$1&agency=$2 [PT]
This is working fine for redirecting the pages. However, it seems to me that my javascript files are being re-loaded with each page, as if the browser thinks that it's in a different directory and needs to re-load the JS files. The JS files are linked using a hard-coded URL, such as http://app.com/scripts/dostuff.js.
Is it possible that the browser is reloading the javascript files each time? If so, have I done something wrong?
Try this code:
RewriteEngine On
# skip rewrite rules below it is a valid file or a valid directory
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule ^ - [L]
# write single path
RewriteRule ^([a-z]+)/?$ /index.php?p=$1 [L,QSA]
# write 2 paths
RewriteRule ^([a-z]+)/([a-z]+)/?$ /index.php?p=$1&agency=$2 [L,QSA]

Mod-Rewrite rules are breaking 404 routing

I am using the following mod-rewrite in my .htaccess file:
RewriteRule ^$ pages/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ pages/$1 [L]
The intention is to hide the subdirectory called /pages/ from displaying in the URL.
So this: http://mysite.com/pages/home.html
Will look like this: http://mysite.com/home.html
It works but there are some unintended consequences.
As a direct result of the .htaccess code I posted above, my 404 routing is no longer working at all. Anything that should trigger a 404 error page is instead generating a 500 Server Error.
How to fix?
EDIT:
As implied above, it does not matter if a custom 404 page is defined in the .htaccess or not. Without it, or a bad path to the error page, the server should still route to its default 404 page, and not give a 500 Server Error.
Surely, there must be a standard way to suppress sections of a URL without breaking the normal routing of 404 errors. From my online research it seems that my method above commonly breaks the 404 routing, and yet so far, I've seen no applicable solution. (This is not a Wordpress installation; just static HTML content)
EDIT 2:
Since I'm only wanting to suppress the one directory from the URL, I never mentioned that I also have other files & directories which are siblings to /pages/ that cannot be pointed at /pages/, such as /graphics/, /includes/, /css/, /cgi-bin/, robots.txt, favicon.ico, etc.
Maybe this is all an exercise in futility or more trouble than it's worth?
Looking for a definitive answer either way.
Following config will look for your static pages inside the pages/ and if found, it'll display them. This shouldn't break 404.
Put it in root folder of your web in .htaccess
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/pages/%{REQUEST_URI} -f [OR]
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/pages/%{REQUEST_URI} -d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /pages/$1
This should achieve what you are trying to do.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/([a-zA-Z0-9\_\-]+)\.html$
RewriteRule (.*) /pages/$1 [L]
Thank-you to #Kamil Šrot for getting the closest working solution. However, I needed to add another test ( -d ) to see if the requesting URI is a directory.
This is working great and the 404 error page is again routing properly.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/pages/%{REQUEST_URI} -f [OR]
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/pages/%{REQUEST_URI} -d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /pages/$1
How about adding an error page direction to your htaccess file to handle the 404 page:
ErrorDocument 404 /path/to/your/404.html

Zend Framework setting up the htaccess file

I have been using the Zend Framework for years but have realised some crucial problems with our error handling that we are now fixing.
(I posted a different question here: Why my site is always using the ErrorController for all types of errors irrespective of HTTP Status code? explaining the story there).
My question here is a quick one. What does a common .htaccess file of Zend Framework look like?
According to the latest ZF documentation,
SetEnv APPLICATION_ENV development
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -s [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -l [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule ^.*$ - [NC,L]
RewriteRule ^.*$ index.php [NC,L]
However, the above is new to me - can someone explain what it does exactly?
My current .htaccess file has a lot of 301 redirect code but for the purpose of this post I'll only paste the relevant information here:
ErrorDocument 404 http://www.mydomain.com/pagenotfound/
ErrorDocument 503 http://www.mydomain.com/service-unavailable/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/liveagent
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/blog
RewriteRule !\.(js|ico|gif|GIF|jpg|JPG|jpeg|png|PNG|pdf|css|html|xml|swf|php|mp3|mp4|webm|ogv|f4v|flv|txt|wsdl|css3|ttf|eot|svg|woff)$ index.php
The above has been working fine for us, and basically disallows the "liveagent" and "blog" (Wordpress) directories from running with Zend, but I realise I now need to make the following change:
ErrorDocument 404 definitely has to be removed from the code, as Zend Framework should handle all errors. However, when I remove this, going to a URL like www.mydomain.com/this-does-not-exist.php results in a 404 error standard Apache page - it does not load the ZF or the ErrorController. This is because of the "php" exclusion in the above RewriteRule. I do not simply want to remove this since we sometimes want to be able to access php files on the root, such as a separate "holding.php" file which we use for putting the site on maintenance mode.
What is the standard practice? Should I remove the php extension? However this will not solve other 404's like
www.mydomain.com/this-does-not-exist.css
which is also an exclusion (i.e. CSS) in the above RewriteRule.
Therefore, should I completely change the above to Zend's new code for .htaccess as I mentioned above?
If so, I'm a sort of beginner at htaccess - how can I modify that .htaccess code to allow CSS, JS, video files etc. and the blog and liveagent directories to be excluded from the Zend Framework?
I'd switch to the standard ZF rewrite rules instead of the one you have which uses a long regex to redirect to index.php.
Here is an explanation of what the standard .htaccess rules do:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -s [OR] # The request is a regular file with size > 0
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -l [OR] # The request is to a file that is a symlink
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d [OR] # The request is to a directory that exists
# if any of the above conditions are true, then simply handle the request as-is
RewriteRule ^.*$ - [NC,L]
# if none of the above match, then rewrite to index.php
RewriteRule ^.*$ index.php [NC,L]
These default ZF rules don't prevent you from accessing existing php files or any other files that are accessible from your document root. If the file requested exists, then the request for that file is served as is. If the file requested does not exist, then the request is forwarded to index.php
Once the request is forwarded to ZF, if there is no matching route, then the ZF ErrorHandler is called and a 404 page (from ZF) is served.
Using the stock ZF rules won't prevent you from having the desired behavior in your application and server settings, and should be a bit more efficient that the regex you currently have. The only things that will really change is that now requests for files that don't exist will be handled by ZF's error handler and no longer by Apache.
Hopefully that answered your question, if not feel free to comment for clarification.

.htaccess Apache on cPanel only working in some cases

I'm using the Zend Framework, so I'm bootstrapping into a file called index.php. Naturally, I don't want images to be bootstrapped, so I've added a .htaccess file. Here's what it looks like
/application
/library
/public (this is the root of the site)
/images
/js
.htaccess
index.php
This is what's written in my .htaccess:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule !\.(js|ico|gif|jpg|png|mp3|mov|css)$ index.php
This is basically saying if it doesn't end in .js / .ico / etc, then send the request to index.php. It works just fine on my localhost, but when I get up to actually putting it online, it doesn't. It just routes everything to index.php, regardless of the ending of the request. When mywebsite.com/images/wizard.gif should just show the picture, it tries to load the images controller, which is not what I want it to do.
What could be going wrong? I know it's reading the .htaccess. Is it reading my regex wrong? Why would one apache server read it wrong, while another reads it correctly? Any help would be great.
Here is my .htaccess if you would like to give it a try:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -s [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -l [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule ^.*$ - [NC,L]
RewriteRule ^.*$ /index.php [NC,L]
Basically it checks to make sure the request is not a directory, symlink or a real file, and then sends it to index.php. Otherwise it will provide direct access to the file/directory