Question

I’m trying to get apache to serve any request for /uploaded/2 with the first file that starts with 2 in a certain directory (say /foo/bar/).

Basically, If I have directory /foo/bar with contents:

• 1-filenameclutter.wav
• 2-clutterinthefilename.mp3
• 3-someweirdtext.jpg

And a web browser makes a request for /uploaded/1, apache would return 1-filenameclutter.wav; a request for /uploaded/2 would return 2-clutterinthefilename.mp3; etc. (all files with the right mime-type).

As far as I can see, ModRewrite can only go from a source with extraneous data to a simplified file on the file system, not the other way around.

Do you guys know any way to do this, with ModRewrite or using apache in another way (no PHP)?

EDIT:

Two things to point out, 1) I’m not concerned with duplicate files starting with the same id. These files correspond to an object in a database, which has a primarykey, id. 2) The reason I’m doing this is because I won’t know exactly what the extension of the file is, but I do know the id, so when I form these I just prepend the orignal filename to the end of {{id}}- (Don’t worry, I replace all “..”‘s with “~”).

Answer 1

Mod-rewrite has the ability to check if a single specific file exists, but you can’t search a directory for a file pattern. Note that what you are suggesting would have horrible scaling attributes because the system would have to search all the files to find the file you are looking for. Since you already have the file in the database, why don’t you just name the file with the id and keep the real filename in the database? In that case, /uploaded/2 would return the file at that location. You don’t even need mod_rewrite.