Question

In an application that heavily relies on .htaccess RewriteRules for its PrettyURLs (CakePHP in my case), how do I correctly set up directives to exclude certain directories from this rewriting? That is:

/appRoot/.htaccess          app/          static/ 

By default, every request to /appRoot/* is being rewritten to be picked up by app/webroot/index.php, where it’s being analyzed and corresponding controller actions are being invoked. This is done by these directives in .htaccess:

RewriteBase /appRoot  RewriteRule ^$ app/webroot/     [L] RewriteRule (.*) app/webroot/$1 [L] 

I now want to exclude a few directories like static/ from this rewriting. I tried this before the Cake RewriteRules:

RewriteCond $1 ^(static|otherDir).*$ [NC] RewriteRule (.*) - [L] 

It works in so far that requests are no longer rewritten, but now all requests are being skipped, even legitimate Cake requests which should not match ^(static|otherDir).*$.

I tried several variations of these rules but can’t get it to work the way I want.

Answer 1

And the correct answer iiiiis…

RewriteRule   ^(a|bunch|of|old|directories).* - [NC,L]  # all other requests will be forwarded to Cake RewriteRule   ^$   app/webroot/   [L] RewriteRule   (.*) app/webroot/$1 [L] 

I still don’t get why the index.php file in the root directory was called initially even with these directives in place. It is now located in

/appRoot/app/views/pages/home.ctp 

and handled through Cake as well. With this in place now, I suppose this would have worked as well (slightly altered version of Mike’s suggestion, untested):

RewriteCond $1      !^(a|bunch|of|old|directories).*$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$  app/webroot/$1 [L]