Question

I am trying to create some Apache rewrite rules that shall be able to route URI requests like e.g.

http://mydomain.com/articles/example to
http://mydomain.com/index.php?site=articles&page=example

What I’ve got so far is this:

RewriteRule ^/?([a-zA-Z_]+)/([a-zA-Z0-9_]+).html$ index.php?site=$1&page=$2 [L]
RewriteRule ^/?([a-zA-Z_]+)/([a-zA-Z0-9_]+)$ index.php?site=$1&page=$2 [L]

Since I am using relative file paths everywhere in my index.php, for style sheets, scripts, images and the like, I am facing the problem of incorrectly resolved absolute file paths.

For example when I am in the root, http://mydomain.com/ or http://mydomain.com/articles, all relative image paths resolve correctly – images/logo.jpg becomes http://mydomain.com/images/logo.jpg or htdocs/mydomain/images/logo.jpg respectively.

When I click one of my links on the site, e.g. http://mydomain.com/articles/example, Apache (or the Browser?) assumes all my images are located here http://mydomain.com/articles/images/ – it is pretty obvious that this path doesn’t really exist.

So here are my questions:

1. Is it possible to solve this problem without changing all my relative file paths to absolute ones?

I could use root / for all my paths on my actual web server, because my domain is advantageously linked.
mydomain.com is linked to /html/mydomain on my web server – / resolves to mydomain.com/, but on my personal computer I am running XAMPP and / resolves to htdocs/ – it should however resolve to htdocs/mydomain/ simply because I hold several sites in htdocs

Absolute file paths are terrible when updating index.php to my web server, because I have to auto-systematically replace path declarations – not only in index.php, but style sheets and scripts as well.

2. Should I create a static DNS entry on my personal computer to adapt to my web server?

3. What is the most commonly used method?

Thank you in advance!

Sincerely, Sebastian

Answer 1

I figured it out by myself, by editing Windows’ hosts file and the Apache’s httpd-vhosts.conf file.

1. Adding a new static DNS entry to %SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

127.0.0.1 www.mydomain.local

2. Appending a new virtual host entry to %ApacheInstallDir%\conf\extra\httpd-vhosts.conf

<Directory "E:\htdocs">
Order Deny,Allow
Allow from all
</Directory>

NameVirtualHost 127.0.0.1

<VirtualHost 127.0.0.1>
DocumentRoot "E:\htdocs"
ServerName localhost
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost 127.0.0.1>
DocumentRoot "E:\htdocs\mydomain"
ServerName www.mydomain.local
</VirtualHost>

Now http://www.mydomain.local leads to htdocs/mydomain directly

3. Changing all relative paths and links in my index.php by simply “rooting” them with a / in front of them, e.g. <img src="/images/logo.jpg" />

I also managed to set up a Site in Dreamweaver, so I am able to use the Design- and the Live-View correctly.