Question

I know there are TONS of questions on this website regarding this topic, as well as TONS of tutorials around google. However I have searched for a while now and I cannot seem to find one that explains my specific situation.

I am building a social application in which the whole application is being stored in a directory of a subdomain the website like so: subdomain.example.com/network/ <– network being the directory of all the application files.

I have my .htaccess file located in the root of the subdomain and as of right now I have it removing .php from all the files and that is working throughout the entire project as it should. I have a user.php page which each user’s profile is based off and the unique identifier for each user is their username (not ‘id’ like most people use.) So right now the urls look like /network/user.php?username=TylerB which is not very pretty. I have tried many different things to get this to look like /network/user/TylerB but nothing I try seems to work. I don’t know if it’s because it’s in a directory, a subdomain or what. As of right now, when I have /network/user/TylerB (TylerB is my username) it gives me a 404 error.

Here is my current .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^user/([^/\.]+)/?$ user.php?username=$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^([a-z]+)/([a-z\-]+)$ /$1/$2.php [L]

Answer 1

I would recommend setting the RewriteBase directive and matching on the full pattern, making sure to rewrite to the /network/ directory.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^network/user/([^/\.]+)/? /network/user.php?username=$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^([a-z]+)/([a-z\-]+)$ /$1/$2.php [L]

Using the testing tool at http://htaccess.madewithlove.be/ I get an output of:

This rule was met, the new url is http://example.com/network/user.php?username=name
The tests are stopped because the L in your RewriteRule options