Apache mod_rewrite not doing anything (?)

Question

Hi, I'm having some trouble with Apache's mod_rewrite. One of the things I'm trying to get it to do is hide some of my implementation details, so that, for example, the user sees the URL http://www.mysite.com/login but Apache responds with the page at http://www.mysite.com/doc_root/login.php instead (preferably without showing the user that it's a PHP file or the directory structure). Here's what I have in my .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www.)?mysite.com*
RewriteRule ^/(\w+) /doc_root/$1.php [L]

#Redirect http://www.mysite.com to the login page
RewriteRule ^/?$ https://www.mysite.com/doc_root/login.php

But when I go to http://www.mysite.com/login, I get a 404 error even though the page exists. I clearly don't have a great understanding of how the mod_rewrite conditionals and rules work, so can anyone please tell me what I'm doing wrong? Thanks.

Answer 1

Take doc_root out of all the stuff you have it in. That will give you the result you're asking for. However I'm not sure if it's desired or not. How are you going to force someone to login if they manually type http://www.mysite.com/index.php?

Also if you're trying to force all traffic to SSL it's better to use a second VirtualHost and Redirect instead of mod_rewrite. Those are all questions probably better suited for ServerFault

Answer 2

• Unless your site has a bunch of different domain names, and you only want mysite.com to do the rewriting, you don't need the RewriteCond. (Potential problem. Apache likes to dick around with the domain name unless you set UseCanonicalName off. If the name isn't what it's expecting, the rewrite won't happen.)
• In RewriteCond (and RewriteRule) patterns, . matches any character. Add a backspace before them. (Minor bug. Shouldn't cause rewrites to fail, but they would match stuff like "mysite-com" as well.)
• mod_rewrite is actually a URL-to-filename filter. Though it is often used to rewrite URLs to other URLs, sometimes it will misbehave if what you're rewriting to is a URL and it can't tell. (Especially if what it's rewriting to would be an alias, or would otherwise not translate directly to a real filename.) If you add a [PT] flag onto your rule, though, it will consider the rewritten thing a URL and pass it along to the other filters (including the ones that turn URLs into filenames).
• Do you really need "/doc_root"? The document root should already be set up in Apache using the DocumentRoot directive, and shouldn't need to be part of the URL unless you have multiple apps on the same domain (in which case it's the app root; the document root doesn't change).

UPDATE:

• Another thing i just thought about: Rewrite rules work differently in .htaccess files. Apache likes to strip off the leading slash. So you will probably want to get rid of the first slash in your patterns, or at least make it optional (^/?login instead of ^/login).
• ^/?(\w+) will match /doc_root/login.php, and cause a rewrite to /doc_root/doc_root.php. You should probably have a $ at the end of your pattern.