Question

I have this in my .htaccess file

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^([^?]*) index.php?_route_=$1 [L,QSA]

What I am trying to do is add another RewriteRule to this configuration so that old URLs like these will be redirected to the root of the site

http://www.acme.com/category.php?id=6
http://www.acme.com/product.php?id=183&category= 

I know that “category.php” and “product.php” will now be a invalid strings. Using “category.php” as an example I tried altering the config to be this

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^category.php(.*) / [L,R=301]
RewriteRule ^([^?]*) index.php?_route_=$1 [L,QSA]

This will redirect as follows

http://www.acme.com/category.php?id=112 -> http://www.acme.com/?id=112

I have two problems

1. I don’t want the query string to be appended. I haven’t specified
   [QSA]
2. If I enter the root directly www.acme.com the page won’t display
   unless I remove the line I just added. Why would my new RewriteRule
   affect URL’s that dont start with “category.php”?

[Edit]

I have also tried this instead of the redirect above, but I still seem to be getting both rules being applied

RewriteRule ^category.php /holdingPage.php [L]

Answer 1

You need the 2 conditions to be tied to the old rule that sends everything through index.php and you need to add your new rule above them:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

RewriteRule ^category.php /? [L,R=301]

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

To deal with 1., I’ve added a “?” at the end of the / in the rule’s target. That makes it so query strings won’t automatically get appended unless you specifically have the QSA flag. As for 2., not sure why it wasn’t working for you, but it may have had something to do with the 2 conditions that were being applied to the wrong rule.

---

EDIT:

For a description of the 2 RewriteCond lines, see this post: https://stackoverflow.com/a/11275339/851273

A RewriteCond is essentially a conditional, this block:

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

is essentially this (in pseudo code):

if(request_uri != maps_to_existing file) {
    if(request_uri != maps_to_existing_directory) {
        request_uri = request_uri.replace("([^?]*)", "index.php?_route_=$1", "[L,QSA]");
    }
}

The thing is, a RewriteCond, or many of them one directly after another, only applies to the immediately following RewriteRule, so without moving the category.php rule out in front, the pseudoc deo equivalent would have been:

if(request_uri != maps_to_existing file) {
    if(request_uri != maps_to_existing_directory) {
        request_uri = request_uri.replace("^category.php", "/?", "[L,R=301]");
    }
}
request_uri = request_uri.replace("([^?]*)", "index.php?_route_=$1", "[L,QSA]");

Which is kind of broken because the 2 if() conditionals are being mis-applied. Specifically the one that rewrites to “index.php” sort of requires the conditionals in order to prevent itself from looping.