.htaccess rule not working without HTTP redirect [R]

Question

I am using the following .htaccess with Wordpress to remove index.php from the visible URL. This works but forces an http redirect so the URL changes in the browser window. If I remove the [R] it no longer works. Why would this happen?

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [R] 

Answer 1

It seems you're mixing Wordpress itself, which tries to do a redirect, and the RewriteRule, where you don't have to do a redirect: it's rewritten internally before arriving to Php, thus before arriving to Wordpress. If you just stop rewriting and add the QSA flag to always keep the query string, this should do the trick.

Try to do this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [QSA,L]

If it doesn't work, try to do this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [QSA,L]

If it doesn't work, try to do this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !(index\.php)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [QSA,L]

And if that's not enough:

Two hints:

If you're not in a hosted environment (= if it's your own server and you can modify the virtual hosts, not only the .htaccess files), try to use the RewriteLog directive: it helps you to track down such problems:

# Trace:
# (!) file gets big quickly, remove in prod environments:
RewriteLog "/web/logs/mywebsite.rewrite.log"
RewriteLogLevel 9
RewriteEngine On

---

My favorite tool to check for regexp:

http://www.quanetic.com/Regex (don't forget to choose ereg(POSIX) instead of preg(PCRE)!)

Answer 2

It appears that I forgot a major piece. I was skipping over the fact that the query string needed to be sent to the get variable q.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?q=$1 [L,QSA]