Question

(Not sure if this belongs here or on webmasters; please move if necessary.)

I’m a total newbie to Cake and not much better with apache; I’ve done
a lot of PHP but always with a server that’s already been set up by
someone else. So I’m going through the basic blog tutorial, and it
says:

A Note On mod_rewrite
Occasionally a new user will run in to mod_rewrite issues, so I’ll
mention them marginally here. If the Cake welcome page looks a little
funny (no images or css styles), it probably means mod_rewrite isn’t
functioning on your system. Here are some tips to help get you up and
running:

Make sure that an .htaccess override is allowed: in your httpd.conf,
you should have a section that defines a section for each Directory on
your server. Make sure the AllowOverride is set to All for the correct
Directory.

Make sure you are editing the system httpd.conf rather than a user- or
site-specific httpd.conf.

For some reason or another, you might have obtained a copy of CakePHP
without the needed .htaccess files. This sometimes happens because
some operating systems treat files that start with ‘.’ as hidden, and
don’t copy them. Make sure your copy of CakePHP is from the downloads
section of the site or our SVN repository.

Make sure you are loading up mod_rewrite correctly! You should see
something like LoadModule rewrite_module libexec/httpd/mod_rewrite.so
and AddModule mod_rewrite.c in your httpd.conf.”

I’m using XAMPP on linux. I’ve found my httpd.conf file in opt/lampp/
etc, but am not sure what I need to do with it. I’ve searched for
“rewrite”, and there’s only one line:

LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so

There’s nothing about AddModule mod_rewrite.c.

Do I just create a Directory section for the directory I’ve installed
Cake in and set AlllowOverride to All? (I created a separate
subdirectory of my wwwroot and installed in there, since I also have
installs of Joomla and CodeIgniter.) Is there anything else I need to
do? My download of Cake did come with two htaccess-type files
(._.htaccess and .htaccess) – do I need to do anything with them?

Thanks for any help you can provide to this non-server-admin.

EDIT TO ADD virtual host sample:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerAdmin [e-mail]
    DocumentRoot /www/docs/dummy-host.example.com
    ServerName dummy-host.example.com
    ServerAlias www.dummy-host.example.com
    ErrorLog logs/dummy-host.example.com-error_log
    CustomLog logs/dummy-host.example.com-access_log common
</VirtualHost>

Answer 1

Step 1. You should have mod_rewrite enabled, check using <?php phpinfo();

Step 2. Check AllowOverride

// I believe you already did that. 
// Make sure you are doing it for the correct webroot!
<Directory />
   AlllowOverride to All
</Directory>

Step 3. Check your default .htaccess files are there in directories /mypro, /mypro/app, /mypro/app/webroot.

Step 4. .htaccess may need path fixes depending upon your cake project installation.

 e.g. project url http://localhost/mypro/app/webroot/
 /mypro/app/webroot/.htacess
 <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteEngine on
    RewriteRule    ^$ mypro/app/webroot/    [L]
    RewriteRule    (.*) mypro/app/webroot/$1 [L]
 </IfModule>

EDIT

If you are trying to setup it as local domains, Setup local domains (on windows) with WAMP configured
Note: this may be tweaked a little for different kind of installations
Find your hosts file (mine is located at C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts)
Insert this to bottom

# save and close this file named hosts
127.0.0.1       mypro.localhost

To test hostname open command prompt and run ping mypro.localhost # If ping is good then move on

Now open your apache config file 
httpd.conf and httpd-vhosts.conf (my files are located at)

C:\wamp\bin\apache\Apache2.2.11\conf\httpd.conf
# uncomment line below
Include conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf
C:\wamp\bin\apache\Apache2.2.11\conf\extra\httpd-vhosts.conf
# Insert virtual host entries like this, trim dummy entries (if any)

# Changing DocumentRoot
<VirtualHost *:80>
    DocumentRoot "C:/wamp/www"
    ServerName localhost
</VirtualHost>
<VirtualHost *:80>
    DocumentRoot "C:/wamp/www/mypro/app/webroot"
    ServerName mypro.localhost
</VirtualHost>

Save and close files

Create directory C:/wamp/www/mypro (if you haven’t created before)