How to do htaccess redirect based on cookie value

Question

I have failed at Google and I could not find the answer searching here. Sorry, I'm a newb at htaccess and it has really odd syntax and is so hard to learn!

You can see what I'm trying to do here...

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_COOKIE} ^.*user_id=(\d+).*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .* http://localhost/mysite/cache/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule .* http://localhost/mysite/cache/guest [R=301,L]

I'm caching the pages for each user for load speed. I want to redirect to the proper HTML cache folder if they're logged in with a cookie, otherwise I want to load the guest cache.

Right now it goes into an infi-loop. If I remove the [R=... then I get internal server error.

Please help!!! THank you!!!

Answer 1

Hello

This works for a cookie like id=1234:

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_COOKIE} ^id=([0-9]*)$ [NC]

RewriteRule .* http://localhost/mysite/cache/%1 [R=301,L]

RewriteRule .* http://localhost/mysite/cache/guest [R=301,L]

Now for your problem: Make sure that your htaccess does not apply to the page you rewrite to! For example, if your .htaccess lies in

"/mysite/.htaccess"

it will be used again in

"http://localhost/mysite/cache/%1"

Thats maybe the reason for your infinite loop. To resolve this, either make sure the htaccess rules are not applied to the subdirectories or use another directory for the cache.

Hope that helps.

Cheers

Answer 2

Here is the solution for anyone else having this problem:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^.+$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_COOKIE} ^.*user_id=(\d+).*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .* http://localhost/mysite/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule .* http://localhost/mysite/guest [R=301,L]

Although I haven't tested the cookie part yet - I'm sure there will be many more problems there! But the rest I tested and it works! (it goes to guest and then does not go into infi-loop, yay!)

Have a great day! 8)