Question

I’m trying to rewrite all request paths to my initiation file. Like so:

RewriteRule .* framework/init.php

Except, within this framework there are some directories from which files may be served without having the request to be handled by PHP. However, I don’t want to use the actual path to these directories, because I want to be able to have these paths interpreted by the PHP router.
Therefore I’d like to have aliases for these directories. For example:

RewriteRule ^i/com/(\w+)/(.*)$ framework/components/$1/images/$2

Now the problem is, that both of these rewrite rules work individually, but when I try to combine them, things go wrong. It looks like it reevaluates my entire .htaccess after the alias rewrite has occurred. Here are some examples of what I tried:

Skipping the rewrite-everything line under certain conditions:

rewriteRule ^i - [S=1]
RewriteRule .* framework/init.php
RewriteRule ^i/com/(\w+)/(.*)$ framework/components/$1/images/$2

Does not work. It appears like the second line gets skipped, then the third line rewrites to a condition where the second line does not get skipped, so then the second line executes.

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Using an exclusive rewrite-everything line:

RewriteRule (?!i).* framework/init.php
RewriteRule ^i/com/(\w+)/(.*)$ framework/components/$1/images/$2

Same story.

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Stopping the rewrite engine after the exception line:

RewriteRule ^i/com/(\w+)/(.*)$ framework/components/$1/images/$2 [L]
RewriteRule .* framework/init.php

Not working.

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Adding a rewrite condition:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(?!i)
RewriteRule .* framework/init.php
RewriteRule ^i/com/(\w+)/(.*)$ framework/components/$1/images/$2

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Note that all of the above examples start working when I remove one of two RewriteRules. I’ve looked for similar questions, but they all have solutions that I tried to apply. The one difference between their questions and mine, is that I want to rewrite my “special” directory to a directory that, when normally requested, would result in a rewrite to init.php. Can anyone tell me if this is at all possible, and if so, what I am missing or not getting?

Answer 1

I found a solution today. I set an environment variable when the ^i-rule is matched, and check if that environment variable is set later. If it is, I skip the .*-rule. Like so:

RewriteRule ^i/com/(\w+)/(.*)$ framework/components/$1/images/$2 [E=REWRITE:1,L]
RewriteCond %{ENV:REDIRECT_REWRITE} !1
RewriteRule .* framework/init.php

It might be a little ugly. But it works like a charm in older versions of Apache.