Question

I’m working with a client and we just recently moved their website from Godaddy (ew!) to Pair Networks. I’ve used Pair personally and for clients for many years and have had great experiences with them. Unfortunately for this issue, because it is a shared hosting plan URL rewriting technical support doesn’t fall under the support plan.

Anyway, as soon as we moved the site over the rewriting rules in the root .htaccess no longer work. The .htaccess contains:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^((images|styles|scripts|documents)/*.*)$ $1 [L]
RewriteRule ^(admin/*)$ index.php/$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9]+)$ page/id/$1
RewriteCond $1 !^(index\.php|robots\.txt|favicon\.ico)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php/$1 [L]

The error according to Apache is too many redirects which results in an error 500 being displayed. If I comment out this:

#RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php/$1 [L]

Then the default page loads (index.php sets a default if none is specified in the URL), but then none of the other pages can load. I’ve had to manually add entries for each URL format to the .htaccess to keep the site functional, resulting in this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^((images|styles|scripts|documents)/*.*)$ $1 [L]    
RewriteRule ^(admin/*)$ index.php/$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^(admin/([a-zA-Z0-9]+))$ index.php/$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^(admin/([a-zA-Z0-9]+)/([a-zA-Z0-9]+))$ index.php/$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^(page/id/*)$ index.php/$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^(page/submit)$ index.php/page/submit [L]
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9]+)$ index.php/page/id/$1
RewriteCond $1 !^(index\.php|robots\.txt|favicon\.ico)
#RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php/$1 [L]

The site uses Codeigniter, so the expected final rewritten URL format is: http://server/index.php/page/id/example to load http://server/example.

I’ve had another client on Pair servers using the exact same CMS and same original .htaccess for roughly 6 years with no issue, so I’m a bit flabbergasted at why this would all of a sudden cause issues. They both even use the same version of Apache and PHP (2.2.22 and 5.3.8, respectively).

Does anyone have ideas on what the issue might be? I’d much prefer to not have to manually define all routes like this.

Answer 1

We’ve used a very similar set of rules for years with no problem. Except we have two RewriteCond rules just ahead of that line to check that the request isn’t for a file or directory:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php/$1 [L]