Drupal Clean Urls break randomly for arbitrary paths.

Question

I've done everything right. My server has mod_rewrite enabled, my virtualhost path has AllowOverride set to All, and I have the .htaccess file in place with the rewrite rules same as everyone. But I have trouble accessing some pages using their clean url paths. So for 90% of the pages, clean urls work fine. But for that 10%, they don't.

I have checked whether those pages exist -- they do. Checked whether they are accessible using index.php?q=[path] -- and they are. They are only inaccessible through clean url paths.

Can anyone help me with this mystery?

Answer 1

mod_rewrite has a few long-standing bugs that mangle URLs on the way through (do your problem urls have any escape characters?). I don't know if Drupal does this, but in other PHP apps I have had to add code to re-do the rewrite once the correct entrypoint has been reached.

Unfortunately, Drupal can't take its search path in PATH_INFO (as a lot of other apps do), otherwise you could use mod_alias which is much simpler and much more reliable.

Answer 2

Because you can access your pages through q=path/to/menu/item, then it's clear that it is mod_rewrite that is at fault and not Drupal.

To debug what is going on with your rewrite, either turn on the rewrite log and tail -f it while you request the troubled pages, or alternatively print_r($_GET) at the top of index.php or page.tpl.php to see what is actually being requested.

If you are comfortable posting your potentially sensitive .htaccess here, do so and we can have a look at it for you to see if there are any misconfigurations.