.htaccess and easy URIs

[deadonarrival]

Hey guys

 

I had a perfect setup for this years ago but lost it in a hard drive crash (it wasn't part of a project, just a test). What I'm trying to do is the standard

http://website.com/seo/friendly/urls/ but can't quite get it right

 

I seem to remember that my system just redirected everything to index.php (invisibly) and PHP did some parsing of the URL to put values into arrays

So first up, I need some .htaccess to redirect everything to index.php

 

I have

#Rewrite on
RewriteEngine On

#If the URL points to a real file/directory, don't redirect
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

#Send site.com/a/b/c/ to site.com/index.php
RewriteRule ^/?(.+)$ http://site.com/~user/sitename/index.php?values=$1 [L]

 

This works in terms of it gets the values to index.php but has problems:

1) I have to use a full URL (including http://site.com) because if I just put index.php?values=$1 or /index.php?values=$1 I get 404 errors - this means I can't just move straight over to the production server

2) It's not invisible - the URL bar no longer shows http://site.com/a/b/c/, it shows http://site.com/index.php?values=a/b/c/

 

So I think I'm doing something wrong, and I can't for the life of me remember how I did it last time. I know it's possible, because I definitely remember the end results being that I took it a stage further and had something like http://site.com/page/a.b/1.2/ mapping to index.php and including page.php within that, with $values[a] = 'b' and [1] = [2]

 

Any hints/tips/"look here"s/fully working code snippets/"you're an idiot, it's this"s are gratefully accepted

[deadonarrival]

Aha, got it. I found an old post on here documenting when I got it right first time round, back in 2008

 

http://forums.phpfreaks.com/index.php?topic=198062.msg894306#msg894306

 

First up I had to set the Rewrite Base

RewriteBase /path/to/site/

 

Then the rule I used was

RewriteRule ^/?(.+)$ index.php?values=$1 [L,QSA]

Which takes http://site.com/a/b/c/ and gives a $_GET['values'] variable which looks like a/b/c/ and can then be parsed by splitting.

 

PHPFreaks, helping me to help myself.

[deadonarrival]

Okay, I've mostly solved it...

 

With the above, the url cleanly redirects to index.php with the variables easily accessible. The obvious problem being that EVERYTHING gets redirected, and I need to ignore certain files.

 

I made a simple regex to ignore .png etc, but with the mod_rewrite then any image in the site with a relative path eg img/pic.png is being rewritten to http://site.com/a/b/c/img/pic.png rather than http://site.com/img/pic.png

 

I can solve this by adding / to the start of images, but this is a bit counter-intuitive as I'd have to remember to do it every time: that's fine for now while it's just me working on it, but in 6 months I'll forget that and be scratching my head again.

 

I've come up with the following which is "nearly there". It works if the url is site.com/ or site.com/a but not if it goes any further eg site.com/a/ or site.com/a/b. Can anybody spot where I'm going wrong?

 

^(/.*/)*(/.*\.(png|css|jpg|jpeg|gif|js)+)$

 

I think what I need to do is use regex to split it into three sections, but 2 is turning out to be tricky

1) /a/b/c/d/e/....ad infinitum

2) = /img/ subfolder (possibly optional, things can be in root)

3) = file.png

 

My other option is to write some PHP functions for images in order to remove anything after the base site path and write the URL there - ie get the location of /site/index.php, strip anything after site/ and add image.png after that. The problem here is as before, in 6 months I'll forget that I have to use the function.