Question

Apache doesn’t catch the below .htaccess rule if requests are made by relative paths.

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f  [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule ^ - [L]

RewriteRule ^(.*)/?$ index.php?var=$1 [NC,L]

E.g. if the HTML sent to the client includes:

<link href="CSS/main.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

Apache will skip the rule. If however the HTML includes:

<link href="http://host.com/CSS/main.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

it works just fine.

The same goes for relative paths inside e.g. CSS files, like:

background-image:url(../images/image.png);

that is, if the requested CSS has first been requested with the full path name.

How is this possible?

Answer 1

The second RewriteRule will only rewrite the search path internally, on the server that is. So, when a relative search path is sent to the client, say:

<link href="CSS/main.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

whatever is referred to as $1 in the second RewriteRule will be included in the search path.

So, if e.g. http://www.example.com/en/ is requested by the client and a HTML document including the relative path href="CSS/main.css" is sent back, the client will expect the css file to be located in www.example.com/en/CSS, not www.example.com/CSS/. Naturally then if the css document in the example is referred to with a direct path like: href="http://example.com/CSS/main.css" the document will be correctly retrieved.