mod_rewrite, only access one part of URL for blog entry - apache

In other sites I've worked on, I have been able to easily generate search engine friendly URLS using the following in .htaccess:
<files entry>
ForceType application/x-httpd-php5
</files>
I'm working on a site hosted by a company that runs PHP as fast CGI and this does not work. I am trying to achieve the following URL - http://somewhere.com/blog/entry/12/this-is-the-title
I am just looking for the id (12 in the example) and do not necessarily need the title (my logic behind this being that the title might be changed by the client, links might be broken). I tried the following mod_rewrite but it does not work if I add the title:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^entry/([^/\.]+)/?$ index.php?id=$1 [L]
I've never worked with mod_rewrite before and a lot of the documentation I've come across is about achieving far more complex results. Any help would be appreciated

If the .htaccess file is in fact placed as /blog/.htaccess, you will need a RewriteBase /blog/ line.
Just looking for numbers will also help limit the returned id.
RewriteRule ^blog/entry/([01-9]+)/?$ index.php?id=$1 [L]
This also drops the '/?$' part of the regex. The '$' at the end anchors the match to the end of the string - you just need the numbers, and can ignore anything that is not a digit.

Related

How to include a single $ (dollar-sign) within the rewrite rule

I'm trying to create a rewrite rule for my .htaccess file. I want to include a single dollar sign within it. It is supposed to be something like this:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^.*$
RewriteRule ^\$$ "http\:\/\/domain\.com\/something" [R=301,L]
The problem is that it doesn't work with a single dollar sign, so if I go to domain.com/$ I get a 404. It works only with another letter, for example ^\$a$ - in such case domain.com/$a would redirect to domain.com/something.
The workaround is to create a new folder, rename it to $ and put the .htaccess file there, but I would rather avoid creating multiple folders with no content for such purposes. I couldn't find any reference on the Internet (the official Apache documentation for mod_rewrite was not very helpful). I tried using multiple slashes in different combinations but everything failed. Am I missing something or is it just impossible to make it work this way?
For me it works exactly as expected in htaccess with RewriteRule ^\$$ and requesting "$". Have you looked at the rewritelog / loglevel rewrite:trace8 yet?

Rewrite PyroCMS blog URLS?

Say I have example.com set up with a PyroCMS installation, everything is working fine.
I've created a few posts on the blog and categorised them, so I end up with URLs like the following:
example.com/blog/category/foo
example.com/blog/category/bar
I'd like to access those categories with much shorter URLs, like the following:
example.com/foo
example.com/bar
I've tried the following (and several variations on it) in the .htaccess but gotten nothing but 500 errors and infinite redirects. It's the standard file as per github that I'm working with, with my additions below:
<IfModule mod_php5.c>
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php/$1 [L]
RewriteRule foo /blog/category/foo [L]
</IfModule>
If anyone knows how to do this it would be much appreciated :)
I'm sure this is possible and preferable at the .htaccess level but I've settled for a PHP based approach for now. Specifically, adding some routes to the top of my system/cms/config/routes.php:
$route['(foo)'] = 'blog/category/$1';
$route['(bar)'] = 'blog/category/$1';
I had a follow up question of how to get this to work with examples.com/ (i.e. the site root), this approach doesn't work for that though unfortunately.

Using .htaccess rewrite rules to reflect a "fake" directory structure in the addres bar

I'm working with an online encyclopedia and I am trying to achieve the following:
Given the physical location of a file in http://example.com/articles/c/a/t/Cat.html,
Get the location in the address bar to show http://example.com/encyclopedia/Cat.html
This also needs to work so that if a link is clicked or someone types in "example.com/encyclopedia/Cat.html", the server will look for the file in "/articles/c/a/t/Cat.html", yet still serve the shorter URI in the address bar.
I understand this may involve some heavy .htaccess voodoo to accomplish, or perhaps that it would be better to use a PHP script to serve this purpose.
So far I have the following in my .htaccess:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^encyclopedia/(.*)\.html$ articles/$1.html [NC]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET\ articles/(.*)
RewriteRule ^articles/(.*) /encyclopedia/$1 [L,R=301]
</IfModule>
However with this code, it only works by going to "example.com/encyclopedia/c/a/t/Cat.html" and showing the proper page, and when you go to "/articles/c/a/t/Cat.html it still doesn't rewrite it as "/encyclopedia/", it just stays the same.
Edit - By removing the GET\ part from the RewriteCond and removing the leading forward-slash from /encyclopedia/$1 in the following line, any requests to "/articles/c/a/t/Cat.html" are correctly redirected to "/encyclopedia/c/a/t/Cat.html". I am still at a loss trying to remove the "/c/a/t" part though. **
I've tried using the following two rules to remove the "c/a/t/" part:
RewriteRule ^encyclopedia/((.)(.)(.).*)\.html$ articles/$2/$3/$4/$1.html [NC]
RewriteRule ^articles/(.)/(.)/(.)/(.*) /encyclopedia/$4 [L,R=301]
But with no success as I'm sure what's happening is I'm getting the capital "C" from "Cat.html" and putting that in as "/articles/C/a/t/Cat.html" which will obviously not work.
I've been looking around studying .htaccess RewriteRule and RewriteCond for days but I still haven't been able to figure this out and been BHOK enough to cause a few migraines.
Would this be better accomplished using a PHP script? Or can this voodoo be easily enough accomplished via only .htaccess rules?
First thing, forget about .htaccess files. .htaccess files is just an extension of Apache configuration files that you can put in some directories. They're really slowing down your apache server, he needs to check part of his configuration at runtime. It's done to allow some configuration on hosted environments.
Put everything you have in .htaccess files in <Directory> sections on your VirtualHost and use AllowOverride None to tell Apache to forget about trying to read .htaccess files.
So what you need is mod-rewrite voodoo, not .htaccess voodoo :-)
Now your rewrite problem is quite complex. If you need some mod-rewrite help do not forget to read this ServFault article : Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Mod_Rewrite Rules but Were Afraid to Ask?
I assume that your Cat.html -> c/a/t/Cat.html is just an example and that you can have more than 3 letters : CatAndDogs.html -> c/a/t/a/n/d/d/o/g/s/CatAndDogs.html.
The part of mod-reqrite you need is (I think) RewriteMap. There you will find some helpers like lowercase: that coudl help you, but you will also find the prg: which means using an external program to perform the mapping. I would use perl examples of such rewriteMaps examples available via google and make some transformations. Should be quite easy and Fast in Perl to transform CatAndDogs.html in c/a/t/a/n/d/d/o/g/s/CatAndDogs.html.
Note that RewriteMap will never work inside a .htaccess. Forget .htaccess files. The prg: keyword will launch your perl program as a parallel daemon and will feed him with quite a lot of data, you shoudl really write something robust & fast. Do not forget to use the RewriteLock directive to avoid mixing results (some prg: mappers do not care about mixing results, think about load balancers for examples, but you do want to avoid mixing results for parallel queries)

rewritemap for SEO and pretty URLs

I am attempting to redirect & rewrite some dynamic PHP URL's to pretty and SEO friendly URLs. I have manged to do this successfully through .htaccess with the following code:
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^somevar=green&nodescription=([a-zA-Z0-9_-]*)$
RewriteRule (.*) /green\/%1\/? [L,R=301]
RewriteRule ^green/([^/]*)/$ /script.php?somevar=green&nodescription=$1&rewrite=on [L]
This creates a somewhat pretty URL as follows:
http://www.mysite.com/green/aA43-/
As I say, this works absolutley fine. Apart from one thing. The parameter nodescription contains a non-descriptive random set of letters, numbers and other characters.
I would like to rewrite the nodescription parameter to a more descriptive one. I understand that I can do this with a rewritemap through Apache. However, I have no experience at doing soemthing like this, and I'm not entirely sure where to start.
Normally I would simply alter script.php so that it contains more descriptive parameters, but this time I have no control over the script; I am pulling it from another site using cURL.
Can anybody give me an example of how to pull this off?
Thanks!
Matt
Well, to answer my own question, to pull this off you need access httpd.conf file on your apache server. My shared hosting company didn't allow access to this file (I doubt any would allow you access).
So I bit the bullet and purchased a VPS. I will post the steps I took here in order to set the rewritemap up in the hope that it will help a lost soul :) Ok, here goes...
My VPS has WHM installed, so in WHM I went to:
Server Configuration >> Apache Configuration >> Include Editor
Pre Virtual Host Include >> All Versions
This feature takes any text you put in and includes it in your httpd.conf file without worrying that it will be overwritten at a later stage. If you don't have WHM on your server then you can add the text directly to your httpd.conf file; make sure it is outside and before any virtual hosts.
OK, so I included the following map declaration and rewrite rule:
#Map to redirect (swaps key and value)
RewriteMap rwmap txt:/home/*/public_html/rdmap.txt
<Directory /home/*/public_html/test>
Options All -Indexes
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^url/([^/]*)/$ /script.php?foo=${rwmap:$1|$1}&rewrite=on [L]
</Directory>
The actual map is a simple text file containing key/value pairs - you need to place this file in the directory declared in RewriteMap rwmap txt:/home/*/public_html/rdmap.txt.
And there you go. Apache now rewrites my URLs for me and I now have some nice and pretty SEO optimized links thanks to my rewrite map! Hoorah!
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^green/([^/]*)/(.*)$ /script.php?somevar=green&nodescription=$1&rewrite=on [L]
This rewrite will allow you to pass "arbitrary text" that has nothing to do with the rewrite. For example:
http://www.mysite.com/green/aA43-/some-seo-boosting-title
Will still reroute correctly to script.php; the latter part will simply be ignored by the rewrite.

mod_rewrite to alias one file suffix type to another

I hope I can explain this clearly enough, but if not let me know and I'll try to clarify.
I'm currently developing a site using ColdFusion and have a mod_rewrite rule in place to make it look like the site is using PHP. Any requests for index.php get processed by index.cfm (the rule maps *.php to *.cfm).
This works great - so far, so good. The problem is that I want to return a 404 status code if index.cfm (or any ColdFusion page) is requested directly.
If I try to block access to *.cfm files using mod_rewrite it also returns a 404 for requests to *.php.
I figure I might have to change my Apache config rather than use .htaccess
You can use the S flag to skip the 404 rule, like this:
RewriteEngine on
# Do not separate these two rules so long as the first has S=1
RewriteRule (.*)\.php$ $1.cfm [S=1]
RewriteRule \.cfm$ - [R=404]
If you are also using the Alias option then you should also add the PT flag. See the mod_rewrite documentation for details.
Post the rules you already have as a starting point so people don't have to recreate it to help you.
I would suggest testing [L] on the rule that maps .php to .cfm files as the first thing to try.
You have to use two distinct groups of rewrite rules, one for .php, the other for .chm and make them mutually exclusives with RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}. And make use of the flag [L] as suggested by jj33.
You can keep your rules in .htaccess.