Question

So I’ve spent one too many hours on this- getting a bit desperate.

.htaccess:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^submit/?$ submit.php [NC,L]

/etc/apache2/sites-available/applicapple:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerAdmin [e-mail]

    DocumentRoot /var/www/applicapple
    ServerName applicapple.localhost
    <Directory /var/www/applicapple/>
            Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
            RewriteEngine On
            AllowOverride All
    </Directory>

    ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /usr/lib/cgi-bin/
    <Directory "/usr/lib/cgi-bin">
            AllowOverride None
            Options +ExecCGI -MultiViews +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
            Order allow,deny
            Allow from all
    </Directory>

    ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log

    # Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit,
    # alert, emerg.
    LogLevel warn

    CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

submit.php definitely exists. while visiting applicapple.localhost/submit :

With submit.php in the directory, I get The requested URL /submit was not found on this server.

If I remove submit.php, I get The requested URL /submit.php was not found on this server.

If I visit localhost/applicapple it works as expected.

Can someone clue me into what is going on here?

Answer 1

The problem was the MultiViews option in Apache which searches the directory for files with the same name, so /submit gets interpreted as /submit.php if /submit.php exists. I turned off this option and it works as expected now.