Mod_Rewrite rule not working on production server

Question

Hi Guys,

I've been trying without success to get a rule working on my production server that works fine on my WAMP server on my local machine:

    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f
    RewriteRule \.exe /download/ [L]

On my local server it redirects all direct file download requests to /download/ but on the production server the files are just downloaded, if you remove the condition and type a non-existant file name it does redirect to /download/..

Once i've got this working i'm going to add an additional condition that the referer must be something like /download/ok/ for it to download the file.

Answer 1

Try adding this line on top:

Options +FollowSymlinks

so...

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f
RewriteRule \.exe /download/ [L]

This is a good guide: http://corz.org/serv/tricks/htaccess2.php

Answer 2

Try to find out what value %{REQUEST_FILENAME} has:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$
RewriteRule \.exe %{REQUEST_URI}?%{REQUEST_FILENAME} [R]

Maybe you need to compose the correct file system path yourself:

RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}$0 -f
RewriteRule .*\.exe.* /download/ [L]

Answer 3

The download must of been coming from the cache!

I feel really stupid now, i've spent countless hours on this and all this time it was a cache problem, i cleared the firefox cache and it works fine..

I settled on:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f
RewriteCond %{HTTP_COOKIE} !^.*download_key=abc123.*$
RewriteRule \.exe /download/ [R]