Question

I am using Codeigniter 1.7.2 and HMVC (https://bitbucket.org/wiredesignz/codeigniter-modular-extensions-hmvc/wiki/Home).

I have these files and they are organized according to the HMVC:

system/application/modules/welcome/controllers/welcome.php
system/application/modules/welcome/views/index.php

In the routes.php, I have set up a route:

routes['welcome']='welcome/index';

Everything works if the url is in this pattern:
http://www.mydomain.com/index.php/welcome

But now I would like to remove the index.php from the url, so I created the .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php?$1 [L]

Then I set the $config['index_page'] to empty:

$config['index_page'] = "";

Now I can access the page in this url pattern:
http://www.mydomain.com/welcome

Although everything seems to work, I find that every time I access the page, it generates a 404 page not found error in the log:

DEBUG - 2011-01-02 08:28:52 --> URI Class Initialized
ERROR - 2011-01-02 08:28:52 --> 404 Page Not Found --> 

This is not specific to the welcome page, all pages are having the same problem.
I digged into the codes and discovered that this 404 Page Not Found message is generated from the MX_Router.php that comes with HMVC. Specifically, it’s from this function:

public function _validate_request($segments) {      

    /* locate module controller */
    if ($located = $this->locate($segments)) return $located;

    /* use a default 404 controller */
    if (isset($this->routes['404']) AND $segments = explode('/', $this->routes['404'])) {
        if ($located = $this->locate($segments)) return $located;
    }   

    /* use a default 404_override controller CI 2.0 */
    if (isset($this->routes['404_override']) AND $segments = explode('/', $this->routes['404_override'])) {
        if ($located = $this->locate($segments)) return $located;
    }

    /* no controller found */
    show_404();
}

It’s the show_404() function that gets called and therefore I am getting that error message. But since I can access every page without any problem using the url pattern which has index.php removed.

Why is HMVC thinking there’s no controller found in this _validate_request() function?
I will not get the 404 error message in the log if I revert the changes but this also means that I have to keep using the url pattern that has index.php, which looks pretty bad.

Anyone has encountered the same problem before?
Many many thanks to you all.

Answer 1

I think the problem somehow relates to the favicon.ico, some web browsers automatically request yourdomain.com/favicon.ico and if there isn’t one available, it generates a 404 error in the log.