Question

I was trying to learn the htaccess basics but initial step made me go crazy and lost some precious time..

htaccess codes behaves differently when written in single line and when written in two different lines

the code below

RewriteEngine on 
RewriteRule .* good.html   

And the code below

RewriteEngine on RewriteRule .* good.html   

Behave differently..

Please explain how it goes..
I guess, its because htaccess checks all the conditions first and then works..
but that too should not make it work like that..

Answer 1

Apache directives expect to be on a line by itself. So when you have:

RewriteEngine on RewriteRule .* good.html   

The first “word” is the directive, e.g. RewriteEngine. It looks for whether it should be on or off, and the next “word” is on. So far so good, the rewrite engine is turned on. But there’s a bunch of other crap after that and it’ll be ignored.

But when you have:

RewriteEngine on 
RewriteRule .* good.html   

The rewrite engine is turned on like normal. Then a RewriteRule directive is processed. The first “word” in the line is RewriteRule, so the params are RewriteRule regex target [flags].

So when they’re on different lines, everything gets internally rewritten to good.html. On the same time, everything after on is ignored.