Question

My .htaccess file currently looks like this

AddType x-mapp-php5 .php Options +FollowSymLinks Options +Indexes RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteRule ^account$ /account/orders.php [L] 

When I go to http://mywebsite.com/account it properly shows the page at http://mywebsite.com/account/orders.php. But when I change the RewriteRule to

RewriteRule ^account/orders$ /account/orders.php [L] 

and then I go to http://mywebsite.com/account/orders, I get Error 404 Page Not Found. What did I do wrong?

******Additional Details**

I finally diagnosed the problem. But I don’t understand why my solution works. Consider the scenario where account/orders.php exists.

The following rule will not work

RewriteRule ^account/orders$ account/orders.php [L] 

The following rule will work

RewriteRule ^account/order$ account/orders.php [L] 

Ie., the rewrite rule will fail if the Pattern evaluates to an existing file. So when the pattern is the same as the substitution, but minus the extension, the rewrite rule will fail. If I add a file called account/order.php, then both rules will fail.

Why does this happen?

Answer 1

Have you tried a relative path?

RewriteRule ^account/orders$ account/orders.php [L] 

---

Edit   You should also make sure to have MultiViews disabled. This causes that Apache does some additional vague file matching to find similar named files and thus /account/orders would be mapped to /account/orders.php before it’s passed to mod_rewrite.