Building path independent mod_rewrite statements for generic .htaccess file

Question

Say I have three small web applications stored under a shared web root:

• www.example.com/app1/
• www.example.com/app2/
• www.example.com/app3/
• www.example.com/app4/

each application has a .htaccess file containing some run-off-the-mill mod_rewrite statements to rewrite urls like

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/app1/([^/]+)/([^/]+)\.html$
RewriteRule .* /app1/index.php?selectedProfile=%1&match=%2&%{QUERY_STRING}

now, I would like to have a generic .htaccess file in each /app{n} directory. So, no RewriteBase and no /app{n} prefix in the RewriteConds.

One idea I had was making the first level a wildcard directory as well:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)\.html$

seeing as the .htaccess file gets triggered only when the /app{n} directory is entered, this should work.

Is this an acceptable solution?

Are there other, better ones?

Answer 1

You don’t need to specify the full path. You can use relative paths that are then resolved from the base path.

So try this rule:

RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/([^/]+)\.html$ index.php?selectedProfile=$1&match=$2 [QSA]

You could even use just this single rule in your document root directory:

RewriteRule ^(app\d+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)\.html$ $1/index.php?selectedProfile=$2&match=$3 [QSA]