Problem with htaccess file. Wordpress Plugin tells me there is one, I can't find one?

Question

hey guys, i have an really unusual problem i've never had before. i've no .htaccess file on my server. looked everywhere, there is just no file, but a Wordpress Plugin (AskApacheRewriteRules) tells me that the following Rules are active:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

any idea why that could be, i've already wrote my hosting provider, but their service isn't the best.

even if i create an htaccess file with other rules and save it to my root of the server, it doesn't change anything. The plugin always tells me the same and i believe the plugin, because i'm having issues with the /index.php/ in my url (that i don't want to have).

any ideas?

Answer 1

Have you checked if it's defined in your apache configuration file (it appears that the plug is showing an excerpt from that).

Answer 2

On the AskApacheRewriteRules options page, did you make sure that using_index_permalinks is set to false and that using_mod_rewrite_permalinks is set to true? If this isn't the case, WordPress will attempt to use PATH_INFO for your permalinks, resulting in /index.php/(permalink_structure).

Note that the WordPress rewrite class stores its rewrite rules as a WordPress option in the database, which is where AskApacheRewriteRules gets its information. The plugin also apparently formats the rules with the mod_rewrite_rules function before echoing them to the page, which will surround them with:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
...
</IfModule>

So, the likely reason you can't find the .htaccess file is because it doesn't exist; the rules are just present in the database. The reason why the rules are present in the database is because you're using permalinks, and this is the auto-generated WordPress ruleset, which is saved regardless of whether it's actually being used or not.

Edit: You must have a .htaccess file in the root of your web directory with the following contents:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteBase /
    RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
    RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

<IfModule !mod_rewrite.c>
    # If mod_rewrite isn't available, we'll do this a hackish (and bad) way...
    ErrorDocument 404 /index.php
</IfModule>

The rewrite_rules option is stored at SELECT option_value FROM wp_options WHERE option_name = 'rewrite_rules', but it gets regenerated every time you change the permalink, and isn't used except for writing to .htaccess from what I can tell.

Anyway, those are definitely the correct rules for what you want to do. Are you sure that mod_rewrite is enabled on your host?

Edit:

Let's make 100% sure that mod_rewrite is working correctly and go from there.

Create a .htaccess file in your web root with the following rules, exactly as written:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^rwtest http://stackoverflow.com/ [R,L]

Then go to your site with the URL example.com/rwtest and see if you get redirected to StackOverflow. If not, something is wrong with mod_rewrite. If you do, then at least we know that piece isn't the problem.