exclude files from rewrite rule in .htaccess

Question

I'm modifying an existing website that uses a fairly complex .htaccess file to implement a custom MVC type framework so all urls are redirected to index.php?[some parameters] or a 404 page. I'd like to add ajax support to a limited area of the site using XAJAX, and to implement that I need to place two files in the root which are ignored by the rewrite rules. How do I do that?

Answer 1

How about identity rewriting rule with “last” flag on the top of your rules?

For example, to exclude “/a-file-outside-of-rewriting.html” from current set of rules, the following configuration might help:

# http://~/outside-of-rewriting.html will be rewritten to itself (i.e., unmodified).
# then no more rules will be applied (because it has “last” flag.)
RewriteRule ^/a-file-outside-of-rewriting.html$ $0 [L]

RewriteRule ^/any/other/rules(/.*) $1
RewriteRule ^/already/exist(/.*) $1
# ...