How do I exclude CSS, JS, JPG, GIF files from mod_rewrite rules?

Question

This is what I have so far:

RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z0-9_]*)/?$ index.php?page=$1 [NC]
RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z0-9_]*)/([A-Za-z0-9_]*)/?$ index.php?page=$1/$2 [NC]
RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z0-9_]*)/([A-Za-z0-9_]*)/([A-Za-z0-9_]*)/?$ index.php?page=$1/$2/$3 [NC]

All of my css files are located in /ssi/.

The site structure itself is /index.php?page=$whatever

$whatever sometimes includes /'s, so if I go to /whatever/whatever2, with my current rules, it assumes the css is located in /whatever/ssi/*.css.

I hope all of that makes sense.

So, basically I just want to be able to write a condition that says "if it's a css file, don't apply these rules."

Thank you for any help I can get :).

Answer 1

If I understand correctly you wish to exclude the folder /ssi/? If so use a rule like this (in htaccess):

RewriteRule ^(folder|file\.php)

in your case:

RewriteRule ^(ssi)

Answer 2

... it assumes the css is located in /whatever/ssi/*.css.
I just want to be able to write a condition that says "if it's a css file, don't apply these rules."

This translates directly to

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/whatever/ssi/[^/]+\.css$
RewriteRule ...

Answer 3

The problem that you are experiencing is not that the mod_rewrite is being applied to css files, but rather that the paths in your html to your css is relative. The browser is simply requesting the css from the correct relative path. You really have two options.

1. Make your paths to your css relative to the domain instead of to the page (e.g. use /ssi/styles.css instead of ssi/styles.css)
2. Create a rewrite rule to redirect all css to the correct URL. (e.g. RewriteRule (*.css) /ssi/$1

Answer 4

Anticipating you're using Apache with mod_rewrite module, you should try the RewriteCond Directive. The following example excludes all the matches from RewriteCond for the following line with the RewriteRule Directive. The rules are basically regular expression. The one in my example excludes everything which starts with either favicon.ico as well as with css, which is the folder, where my Stylesheets resides.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond $1 !^(favicon\.ico|favicon\.png|media|robots\.txt|crossdomain\.xml|css|js)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php/$1 [L]

Further reading: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_rewrite.html#rewritecond