Simple mod rewrite question

Question

Here is my current .htaccess file:

RewriteRule ^$ index.html [QSA]
RewriteRule ^([^.]+)$ $1.html [QSA]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ dispatch.fcgi [QSA,L]

As you can see, requests to http://domain.com go to http://domain.com/index.html. I want to change this so that they go to http://domain.com/foo, please note that does not exist as a file or folder, it is handled by rails. How do I do this? Note that I have tried the following and it doesn't work:

RewriteRule ^$ foo [QSA]
RewriteRule ^([^.]+)$ $1.html [QSA]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ dispatch.fcgi [QSA,L]

Thanks!

Answer 1

You're probably safe to just change the first line to this:

RewriteRule ^$ foo [QSA,L]

The L flag tells mod-rewrite that it shouldn't apply any other rules after that one. The problem right now is that the second rule gets applied after the first one, and you end up at "foo.html", instead of "foo", right?

The difference between you trying to send to "foo" and the original redirect to "index.html" is that the second rule applies to requests that do not include a period. So when the first rule was redirecting to "index.html", after it was used, the second rule was no longer valid. However, now that you're not redirecting to a location with a period in it, the second rule gets applied after the first one, so you get a double-redirect.

In addition, you may be able to drop the QSA flag from the first line, it depends on your site though. If someone accesses the site like http://domain.com/?user=fred, do you want to send them to http://domain.com/foo?user=fred, or just http://domain.com/foo? If you don't need the Query String Appended, you can drop the QSA flag, and just have:

RewriteRule ^$ foo [L]