Question

I am relatively new to mod_rewrite, but have a site which I would like to have ‘pretty urls.’ Similarly to SO :).

I am attempting to have things like: ‘http://www.whatever.com/search/test‘ get rewritten to ‘http://www.whatever.com/search.php?q=test‘ and have had some limited success. I believe that content negotiation is getting in my way…

For starters here’s my test .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine on RewriteBase /~user/mysite/  RewriteRule ^search$ search/ [R] RewriteRule ^search/([^/]*)/?$ search.php?q=$1 [L] 

Which unfortunately, does redirect to search.php, but does not pass my param in the q variable. However this does work:

RewriteEngine on RewriteBase /~user/mysite/  RewriteRule ^search$ search/ [R] RewriteRule ^search/([^/]*)/?$ s.php?q=$1 [L] # here i've renamed the search.php to s.php to dodge the content negotiation that is happening.. 

In fact, if I remove the rules all together, I get the same result as with the first version of the file. So my conclusion is that since apache is happily redirecting ‘foo’ to ‘foo.php’ even without any mod_rewrite rules, that it must be the content negotiation that is taking care of it. (This is further verified by the fact if I renamed my foo.php to foo.html, it still will find the file if i just go to ‘foo’).

So, the question is. How do I properly use mod_rewrite with regard to content negotiation? Can I disable it for a particular file? Is there a way to ensure that my mod_rewrite rules happen before the content negotiation happens?

If it is relevant, here is the conf file for the mod_userdir part of my apache conf (this test site is in my user’s homedir/public_html):

# Settings for user home directories  <IfDefine USERDIR> <IfModule userdir_module>  # UserDir: The name of the directory that is appended onto a user's home # directory if a ~user request is received.  Note that you must also set # the default access control for these directories, as in the example below. UserDir public_html  # Control access to UserDir directories.  The following is an example # for a site where these directories are restricted to read-only. <Directory /home/*/public_html>     AllowOverride FileInfo AuthConfig Limit Indexes     Options MultiViews Indexes SymLinksIfOwnerMatch IncludesNoExec     <Limit GET POST OPTIONS>         Order allow,deny         Allow from all     </Limit>     <LimitExcept GET POST OPTIONS>         Order deny,allow         Deny from all     </LimitExcept> </Directory>  # Suexec isn't really required to run cgi-scripts, but it's a really good # idea if you have multiple users serving websites... <IfDefine SUEXEC> <IfModule suexec_module> <Directory /home/*/public_html/cgi-bin>     Options ExecCGI     SetHandler cgi-script </Directory> </IfModule> </IfDefine>  </IfModule> </IfDefine> 

Answer 1

Look for this option in your configuration.

Options +Multiviews 

It will look for

/foo/test /foo/ /foo 

and redirect them to

/foo.[any file] 

based upon if it exists and if it fits the content-type requested.

Change the option to this to disable this.

Options -Multiviews