RewriteEngine On showing Apache test page

Question

I have centos 7 and I need to put this .htaccess file inside one of my directories (www/html/forum) in order to display friendly URLs so instead of looking like example.com/index.php?user=222 it would look like example.com/user/222.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
Options -MultiViews
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule \.(jpeg|jpg|gif|png)$ /public/404.php [NC,L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

This worked fine back on my old centos 6.8 but on 7 all it does is to display the Apache test page and all directories and files inside forum show as forbidden. Why is that?

UPDATE: /www/html/forum is the document root and the site is accessed by a "parked domain" (example.com).

Answer 1

UPDATE: The assumptions made here are wrong so this answer is mostly irrelevant now. This answer is just for future reference.

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We're going to have to make some assumptions to answer this...

• /www/html is your document root and therefore /forum is a subdirectory, off the document root in which this .htaccess file is located.
• All requests should be relative to the /forum subdirectory. (Which I assume is why this .htaccess file is in the /forum subdirectory.)

Try changing your directives to the following:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /forum
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule \.(jpeg|jpg|gif|png)$ public/404.php [NC,L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . index.php [L]

Note that I've changed the RewriteBase directive and made both RewriteRule substitutions relative (ie. no slash prefix).

instead of looking like example.com/index.php?user=222 it would look like example.com/user/222.

I'm assuming that everything is in the /forum subdirectory, so this would need to be present in both these URLs: example.com/forum/index.php?user=222 and example.com/forum/user/222 respectively. You would only be able to remove the /forum subdirectory from the URL if this .htaccess file was in the document root. (If a request of the form example.com/index.php?user=222 worked successfully then "something else" is going on here.)

This worked fine back on my old centos 6.8 but on 7 all it does is to display the Apache test page

I don't really see how this could have worked on your "old centos 6.8", unless you had a different directory structure and this was all in the document root and not a subdirectory?

I can only assume that the "Apache text page" is index.php in the document root? Otherwise, where is this located?