mod_rewrite precedence

Question

Let's say I want to support urls like twitter where: twitter.com/username redirects to twitter.com/user_name.php?user=username

I have the following

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ user_name.php?user=$1

And that works fine. But the problem is now that everything, including twitter.com/index.php will of course redirect to user_name.php

How can I either create exceptions or precedence so that "real files" don't get rewritten? I tried adding an explicit rule for index.php before and after that one, but it doesn't seem to take effect.

Answer 1

You need to add RewriteCond for this

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !-f [OR] # for existing files 
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !-d # for existing directories
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ user_name.php?user=$1