URL Rewriting Help

Question

Thank you one and all for your patience and help. I am completely restating the question because it is getting quite long from all my revisions. I have an PHP MVC framework with 4 entry points:

from the root:
index.php
index-ajax.php
admin/index.php
admin/index-ajax.php

I needed a .htcaccess file that would take any request and rewrite it to the corresponding file based on the url. The long url would be index.php?rt=cms/view/15 and I wanted it to be index/cms/view/15. That part is pretty much done except for one gotcha.

Here is my .htaccess file now:

# htaccess file for framework - GOOD
Options +FollowSymLinks

# Turn on the mod_rewrite engine - GOOD
RewriteEngine On

# Hide indexes - GOOD
Options -Indexes

# If a file is not one of these, continue processing. - GOOD
RewriteRule \.(css|js|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|ico)$ - [L]

# RewriteRules for folder index files
#RewriteRule ^(index)?(.php)?$ index.php [L] - GOOD
#RewriteRule ^admin(/?)(index)?(.php)?$ admin/index.php [L] - GOOD

# RewriteRules for admin folder arguements - going from more specific to less
RewriteRule ^admin/ajax/[A-Za-z0-9-_/]*$ admin/index-ajax.php?rt=$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^admin/[A-Za-z0-9-_/]*$ admin/index.php?rt=$1 [L]

# RewriteRule for root ajax file
RewriteRule ^ajax/[A-Za-z0-9-_/]*$ index-ajax.php?rt=$1 [L]

# RewriteRule for root file - by here, it is not ajax or admin related, so only
# possible option left if the root index file
RewriteRule ^[A-Za-z0-9-_/]*$ index.php?rt=$1 [L]

I have made a simple site with two folders - 'root' and 'root/admin', and inside of each of those a css,images, and javascript folder with some dummy content. There is an index.php and index-ajax.php file inside of 'root' and 'root/admin' that simple outputs whatever the url argument is and uses a css, js, and image file from each of the folders.

The problem I have now is that if I do a url like index/blah or /admin/index/blah, then the page presents right and the argument is right. However, when I do a url like index/blah/view or admin/index/blah/view then the arguement is right (?rt=blah/view) but the page presents wrong because the css/js/images file go to index/blah/[css] instead of index/[css].

Any ideas on how to handle this? I allowed css/js/image files to go through as is via the .htaccess so there would be less work there.

Answer 1

Well, it looks pretty good, except those $ you put in the middle would kinda ruin it; a $ marks the end of the regex so I don't think it would work correctly.

Also, I think you may need to escape the forward slashes, but I'm not sure.

Answer 2

The last line should likely be:

RewriteRule ^/([A-Za-z\-_]+)/([A-Za-z\-_]+)/([A-Za-z0-9\-_]+)$ /index.php?com=$1&action=$2&val=$3 [L,R]

Answer 3

Are you sure that everything should be handled by index.php? What about static files such as images/css etc.?

Here is an alternative method which may interest you. You can forward any URL which does not already exist as a file or directory to your index.php file and then parse the URL there, e.g. [domain.com]/cms/view/15 would be rewritten to [domain.com]/index.php/cms/view/15 . You need to have the apache directive AcceptPathInfo set to On for this work.

.htaccess:

RewriteEngine On
#check url is not a valid file
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
#check url is not a valid directory
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
#rewite anything left
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php/$1 [L]

index.php

$path = trim($_SERVER['PATH_INFO'], '/');
$pathParts = explode('/', $path);

if (isset($pathParts[0])) {
    $com = $pathParts[0];
} else {
    $com = 'defaultcom';
}

//$com[1] will be 'view' if supplied
//$com[2] will be 15 if supplied

I like this approach because you are not forced to define and understand the URL in the apache configuration, but you can do most of the work in PHP.

Edit

You could use this as your .htaccess instead, this would redirect any request with an extension not in the list to your PHP script. The RewriteCond should stop requests to the admin folder from being rewritten.

RewriteEngine On
#don't rewrite admin
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^admin/
#rewrite anything with a file extension not in the list
RewriteRule !\.(js|gif|jpg|png|css|ico)$ /index.php [L]

Answer 4

I would do it like Tom Haigh said and parse the requested URL path with PHP:

// extract the URL path
$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI_PATH'] = parse_url($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], PHP_URL_PATH);
// extract the path segments
$segments = explode('/', trim($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI_PATH'], '/'));
// expected parameters and its default values
$params = array(
    'com'    => 'default',
    'action' => 'default',
    'val'    => 'default'
);
foreach ($params as $key => $val) {
    if (isset($segments[0])) {
        $_GET[rawurldecode($key)] = rawurldecode(array_shift($segments));
    } else {
        break;
    }
}
$restOfTheURLPath = implode('/', $segments);
var_dump($_GET);

And the mod_rewrite rules:

# redirect every request, that cannot be mapped to an existing file, to index.php
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^admin(/|$) admin/index.php [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^ index.php [L]

---

Edit    In reply to your comment and now edited question: You can exclude the directories you want with a rule in front that ends the rewrite process:

RewriteRule ^(css|images)/ - [L]
RewriteRule ^admin/index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteRule !^index\.php$ index.php [L]

Answer 5

So the images/css/etc break because you're using a relative URL in the HTML, and now that you're going more nested they're breaking? With some other MVC setups I encountered, there's usually a "root path" variable of some sort, set by the Controller based on the request URL, and used by the View component to prefix all paths to assets like images/styles/scripts.

That turns your .htaccess problem into a Controller/PHP problem, which if that's an acceptable solution for you, would involve your Controller doing something like exploding the request URL on "/"s, counting the number of resulting pieces, and constructing a relative URL from the result.

I did a similar thing for a custom MVC setup I did; check out http://avogadro.ws/hosted/skel/public/results/school-1 and look at the head source for the CSS locations. The CSS for that page is actually at the http://avogadro.ws/hosted/skel/ level, which the Controller builds into a relative string.

Answer 6

Unless I've missed the point of your question (I am pitching in after your question edit), it sounds as if you need to fix relative image/css paths for URLs which are many-folders deep. Simple solution, don't use relative image paths! Just start your image/css links with a forward-slash..

<img src="/img/logo.png" alt="something" />

I've always found it's an easier approach when you have a single template powering many pages which unpredictable folder depths. As long as you have a test URL for local development it works fine for local and production servers.

Answer 7

# htaccess file for framework - GOOD
Options +FollowSymLinks

# Turn on the mod_rewrite engine - GOOD
RewriteEngine On

# Hide indexes - GOOD
Options -Indexes

# If a file is not one of these, continue processing. - GOOD
RewriteRule ^images/([A-Za-z0-9\-_]*)\.(css|js|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|ico))$ - 
RewriteRule ^images/admin/([A-Za-z0-9\-_]*)\.(css|js|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|ico))$ - 
RewriteRule ^admin/(([A-Za-z0-9\-_/]*)/([A-Za-z0-9\-_]*)\.(css|js|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|ico))$ admin/images/$3.$4 [L]
RewriteRule ^(([A-Za-z0-9\-_/]*)/([A-Za-z0-9\-_]*)\.(css|js|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|ico))$ images/$3.$4 [L]

# RewriteRules for folder index files
#RewriteRule ^(index)?(.php)?$ index.php [L] - GOOD
#RewriteRule ^admin(/?)(index)?(.php)?$ admin/index.php [L] - GOOD

# RewriteRules for admin folder arguements - going from more specific to less
RewriteRule ^admin/ajax/([A-Za-z0-9\-_/]*)$ admin/index-ajax.php?rt=$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^admin/([A-Za-z0-9\-_/]*)$ admin/index.php?rt=$1 [L]

# RewriteRule for root ajax file
RewriteRule ^ajax/([A-Za-z0-9\-_/]*)$ index-ajax.php?rt=$1 [L]

# RewriteRule for root file - by here, it is not ajax or admin related, so only
# possible option left if the root index file
RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z0-9\-_/]*)$ index.php?rt=$1 [L]

The above .htaccess works when testing with your directory and file setup on a Linux/apache server

I replaced you ignore-images row with a rewrite that makes a request for an image in /ajax/hello/world/images go to /images and if it's in the admin folder it will go to /admin/images