.htaccess rewrite rules working on Mac Apache 2.2 but not on CentOS Apache 2.4

Question

I've run into an issue when moving from a test server to a production server. I have a set of .htaccess rules in a file in the public_html site root:

#Root directory htaccess
RewriteEngine On    # Turn on the rewriting engine

#Rewrite rules for purchase areas
RewriteRule ^purchase\/(\S+) purchase.php?product=$1 [NC,L] #Purchase a named product
RewriteRule ^purchase purchase.php [NC,L] #Purchase page 

On my test server, these work perfectly loading the correct page each time.

On the production server, everything after the first slash seems to be ignored and a 404 is given. The other .htaccess rules work fine, it just seems to be ones with two levels that don't work as expected.

What have I done wrong, and what can I do to make this consistent?

• Test Server document root http://localhost:8888/ Apache/2.2.34 (MAMP)
• Live Server document root https://example.com/ Apache/2.4.6 (CentOS)

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First update

I have spent a good few hours on this now and in a bout of frustration deleted my .htaccess. I was very surprised to see that some redirects were still working - and it turns out my .htaccess file was doing absolutely nothing aside from custom errors.

Currently, wherever a PHP file exists with a matching name to the URL are opened directly - without any .htaccess in the directory - eg:

With no .htaccess in the directory:

• https://example.com/purchase opens purchase.php
• https://example.com/foo opens foo.php
• https://example.com/bar gives a 404 as bar isn't a file in this directory.

Is this typical Apache behaviour or is there a rule in a different config I need to track down and override?

Answer 1

So I eventually worked this out by going line to line changing redirects to https://google.com to see which worked and which didn't. Any patterns in the .htaccess that had a matching php file wouldn't load.

I think it's a configuration difference between the two rather than a version difference and was fixed immediately in my case by adding Options -MultiViews to the top of my .htaccess file. They then all worked as expected - perhaps multiviews was disabled on my test server.