htcaccess rewrite rules not working

Question

I'm working on a project where I'm trying to do URL rewriting in the root of my website. The current .htaccess is as follows

RewriteEngine On 
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L]

RewriteRule ^screenshot-of-the-week/screenshot/([^/]+) /screenshot-of-the-week/screenshot/index.php?id=

My website has rewrite enabled. I have checked the code through htaccess tester and it shows the correct values.

However, when I visit screenshot-of-the-week/screenshot/123 for example, I get the 404 page. When I visit screenshot-of-the-week/screenshot/ it works fine.

Also, when manually going to the "real" URL, it works as expected: screenshot-of-the-week/screenshot/index.php?id=123

I can't seem to figure out what the problem is and have tried moving .htaccess to a different folder and of course editing the path, but with no success.

Can anyone provide other troubleshooting tips? How can I check what the redirect is actually doing behind the scenes?

Answer 1

The "problem" with this rule is that it also matches the rewritten URL (specifically, [^/] matches index.php), so it will be rewritten again Write time to /screenshot-of-the-week/screenshot/index.php?id=index.php (id=123 parameter is overridden). So, I expect your script to generate a 404 response (not Apache)?

To resolve this issue, you should make the regex more specific and/or use the END flag (Apache 2.4) to prevent the rewrite engine from doing an extra loop (and a second rewrite).

In your example, you are passing a numeric value - so if you only expect a numeric value, only numbers will be matched.

For example:

RewriteRule ^screenshot-of-the-week/screenshot/(\d+)$ /screenshot-of-the-week/screenshot/index.php?id= [END]

Please note that I also added the trailing $ to the regex, otherwise your site could be abused as anything can be appended to the URL and be the same The resources will be served. (Appending / to your original rule will produce the same response.)

(I assume your .htaccess file is in the document root.)

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The MWL tester performs only one pass through the file. This is not how a real Apache server works. Therefore, the MWL tester cannot detect rewrite/redirect loops.

When you visit screenshot-of-the-week/screenshot/, the rule is not processed (regex does not match). mod_dir provides a DirectoryIndex document (index.php), but no id parameter.