Mod Rewrite Tutorial

[kev woodman]

Just came across this and thought it might be useful to someone. It can be a bit heavy going if you haven't used regular expressions but it's still a good overview of what is possible with mod-rewrite.

[Dan]

Yeah, most of my websites use mod re-write now.. infact most websites use them these days anyway. They are the easier way to navigate to a specific location without the need of redirects.

[jon123]

Gawd Damn it! wish i never read the thread.

I have spend best part of 3 hours trying to mod-rewrite some simple dynamic links. I have tried nearly every example on the net and not one worked. I finally found a vid tutorial that kinda explained it in a language i am used to.

I have just got it to work but i think the problem is i still don't fully understand it.
Now I have simple urls with single query vars attached, as in the id=123 kind. Now it has never bothered me before as i was led to believe that single queries as apposed to complex url queries are fine with search engines...well they are not, and i can prove it.
Anyway, all i want is to remove the ?id='' for something like /var

I finally found this:

 
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^company/([0-9]+) co_details.php?id=$1

Simple i know but i tried loads without success. Anyhow, this doesn't remove the ?id= and doesn't redirect to the new addy. If i try a 301 redirect it gived a 'page cannot be displayed' error, cos it doesn't exist right!

So, i simply changed the hyperlink to www.aol.com/company/$id
as opposed to www.aol.com/company/find.php?id=$id

Now all works ok but my question is this :is this the right way to do this? Is there an easier way that redirects to a virtual address? does anyone care? Did England really beat the Aussies?

[kev woodman]

I have to confess that as far as mod_rewrite goes then I tend to think working = good and actually understanding why it works is superfluous.

I have a friend who thinks regular expressions are fudgy chocolate moon raisins but personally I avoid them unless absolutely necessary.

And if you were referring to the rugby I refuse to discuss it :p

[jon123]

Things could be worse Kev, you could have been a supporter of Welsh Rugby..............................oops! you were....may mistake

[kev woodman]

...and so it begins *sighs*

[don'tknowwhati'mdoing]

Hi Guys,

I know this is an old thread, but it concerns exactly what I am trying to do and am really struggling!

It seems initially this was because mod_rewrite was not enabled on my Linux C Panel Premium. I spoke to technical support yesterday and they enabled it, however when I run phpinfo I cannot see it. I queried this with tech support and they said it is definately enabled. I guess I have probably made an error somewhere elese, not being very experienced, so I wondered if there is any other way I could check if mod_rewrite is enabled?

At the moment when I try to access the pages which are supposed to be rewritten (I used a generator to try it out, to ensue it's not an error I have made) give the error 'You don't have permission to access .... Additionally a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle this request'

Any ideas guys?

Thanks in advance

[don'tknowwhati'mdoing]

Have got mod_rewrite working now, although having 1000's of URL's it would be great if I could recall field names from the database to use in the URL's rather than having to rewrite each one individually - any ideas. I'm using MySQL and PHP...

[alvarez16]

Cool tutorial!