Question

I have a question about using multiple .htaccess files – I couldn’t find the answer to this after looking elsewhere on stackoverflow, so I hope you guys can help.

I currently have one .htaccess file in the root of my site, which performs a simple url rewrite:

Options -MultiViews
# CheckSpelling off
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.+)$ index.php?url=$1 [L]
ErrorDocument 404 /index.php

I’m currently working on the second phase of development of this site, and I’ve made a replica in a subfolder (e.g. http://www.abcdef.com/new/). The trouble is, at the moment if I click a link on this replica site, it redirects me to the root, original page, whereas I want it to go to the equivalent page in the new/ folder. I’ve put another .htaccess file in this new/ folder, which however doesn’t have any noticeable effect:

Options -MultiViews
# CheckSpelling off
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /new/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.+)$ /new/index.php?url=$1 [L]
ErrorDocument 404 /index.php

So my question is: is it permissible to have another .htaccess file in a subfolder like this? And if so, why aren’t the above lines working?

Thanks in advance for any ideas on this!

Answer 1

You say

The trouble is, at the moment if I click a link on this replica site,
it redirects me to the root, original page, whereas I want it to go to
the equivalent page in the new/ folder.

Could it be that you are using absolute links in your pages and not relative ones? For instance if a link looks like "/sample", when in your main site it will link to http://.../sample and the same is true if the link is inside a page under "/new/". If you’d use just "sample" then that would resolve as http://..../sample or http://...../new/sample, depending on the URL of the page.