mod rewrite howto

Question

I use the below mod rewrite code for urls like: www.site.com/play/543

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^play/([^/]*)$ /index.php?play=$1 [L]

How can I expand on this so I can have a couple urls like www.site.com/contact and www.site.com/about

Answer 1

RewriteRule ^(play|contact|about)/([^/]*)$ /index.php?$1=$2 [L]

Might do the trick. Now requests to /play/foo points to /index.php?play=foo and /contact/bar points to /index.php?contact=bar and so on.

Edit, from comment "about and contact will never be set though."

Just use two rewrites then;

RewriteRule ^play/([^/]*)$ /index.php?play=$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^(contact|about)/?$ /index.php?a_variable_for_your_page=$1 [L]

Answer 2

The common way used by most of the PHP frameworks is just passing whatever the user requests except existing files (generally assets *.png, *.js *.css) and/or public directories to a PHP script and then interpreting the route on the PHP side.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d #if not an existing directory
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f #if not an existing file
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?url=$1 [QSA,L] #pass query string to index.php as $_GET['url']
</IfModule>

On the PHP side it is very important to avoid things like this

$page = getPageFromUrl($_GET['url']);
include($page);

So be very careful when taking the user input and sanitize/filter to avoid the remote user to access non-public files on your web host.