Question

.htaccess:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/category/([0-9]+)/?$ /category.php?category_id=$1 [NC,L]

I put the file in:
localhost/.htaccess

“category.php” page is in:
localhost/website/category.php

I tried:
localhost/website/category/4/

But it said:

The requested URL
/website/public/category/5/ was not
found on this server.

BTW, I tested .htaccess with another simpler rule and it was working.

Answer 1

First of all:

When using the rewrite engine in .htaccess files the per-directory prefix (which always is the same for a specific directory) is automatically removed for the pattern matching and automatically added after the substitution has been done.

So in case of the document root directory, remove the leading / from the pattern:

RewriteRule ^category/([0-9]+)/?$ /category.php?question_id=$1 [NC,L]

Secondly, since your base path is actually /website/ and not /, change the base path with RewriteBase:

RewriteBase /website/

Note that this base path applies to all rules in this .htaccess file. So you rather might want to change just the particular rules, for example:

RewriteRule ^website/category/([0-9]+)/?$ /website/category.php?question_id=$1 [NC,L]