Question

I’m trying out mod_rewrite for the first time and not having much luck so far. My current URL is in the format of http://mywebsite.com/user/index.php?u=123. How can I rewrite the URL to be http://mywebsite.com/user/123?

So far, I’ve (unsuccessfully) tried the following, which resulted in 500 Internal Server Errors

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^user([^/]*)\.php$ /user/index.php?u=$1 [L]

Where am I going wrong? This should be pretty straight forward.

Answer 1

You very nearly had it correct. Rather than [^/] matching everything up to but not including the next /, you want ([\d]+)$ matching all digits until the end. You’ll need a / after user, and finally, remove the .php.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^user/([\d]+)$ /user/index.php?u=$1 [L]

Note, I also removed the leading / on the right-side rewrite from /user. That may not have been necessary though; I can never remember how it behaves with the leading / unless I test for myself.

Most likely, the cause of your 500 error was a rewrite loop. Since you were matching .php on the end, even user/index.php would match the rule, throwing it into an infinite loop.