How does MediaWiki redirect pages?

Question

Current versions of MediaWiki have the front page accessible via

http://www.example.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Instead of the older version of

http://www.example.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page

That second URL is literally how the PHP script would be called in most casual web apps, but the above URL is cleaner and more desirable. Now, I can see how that could easily be converted with an Apache mod_rewrite rule:

RewriteRule ^/index.php/(.*)$ /index.php?title=$1

But there's no htaccess file in the default MediaWiki setup. So how are they doing the redirect?

Answer 1

Not sure if this is what they are doing, but there no need to redirect using a .htaccess. the page index.php is found and that script is what is loaded. index.php just gets $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] and parses that into the query string.

Answer 2

hxxp://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/core.html#acceptpathinfo