Question

I don’t have much experience with web.config files but what I am trying to do is redirect all requests to index.php only add ?url=REQUESTED_PAGE

eg

if you went to domain.com/about.php?query=string

it would rewrite the url as domain.com/about/ to the user
but process the urldomain.com/index.php?url=about.php&query=string

the idea is to have nice looking user friendly urls whilst the index.php works out which page to show the user. (well am using smarty so which template to use)

EDIT: I am looking for help with web.config not .htaccsess I am restricted to the clients hosting and that isn’t apache unfortunately and the only mod I can find that may or may not work with iis7.5 is £45 which I can not get funding for 🙁

EDIT: My latest attempt is

<rules>
  <rule name="page proc" stopProcessing="true">
    <match url="domain.org.uk(.*?)\?(.*)" />
    <action type="Redirect" url="{R:0}?url={R:1}?{R:2}" />
  </rule>
</rules>

I think I am close but still not working

SOLVED :: !END RESULT!

<rewrite>
    <rules>
            <rule name="page proc">
                <match url="(.*?)\/" />
                <action type="Rewrite" url="/index.php?url={R:1}" appendQueryString="false" logRewrittenUrl="true" />
                <conditions>
                    <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsFile" negate="true" />
                    <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsDirectory" negate="true" />
                    <add input="{QUERY_STRING}" pattern="(.*?)(css|js|pdf|jpg|png|gif)" negate="true" />
                </conditions>
            </rule>
        </rules>
    </rewrite>

Answer 1

You’d need to create a .htaccess file with the following:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.+)$ index.php?url=$1 [QSA,L]

This will pass all requests (unless it’s an existing file or directory) to your index.php script, and you’ll be able to find out what the user requested in your PHP script by doing:

<?php
echo $_GET['url'];
?>

So you may split the passed url parameter at the slashes and pass it off to the correct controller or whatever.

The reason you don’t rewrite existing files or directories is static files like images, stylesheets, JavaScript files etc. Otherwise requests for those files that do exist would still be passed to your index.php script.

Also, the QSA flag after the RewriteRule allows you to continue using query strings in URLs if you wish for things like search form and pagination if you prefer to use $_GET parameters for those too instead of URL segments.