Htaccess redirect rule adds an unwanted variable

Question

I'm trying to redirect logged-in users that land on a page to another page, but the redirect keeps adding the logged-in user's name to the path / URL.

Say I'm logged in as Mario. The redirect includes that username into the redirected path, throwing up a 404 error.

Below is the content of the .htaccess file (without the redirect):

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
AddEncoding gzip .gz
AddEncoding gzip .gzip
<FilesMatch "\.(js.gz|js.gzip)$">
  ForceType text/javascript
</FilesMatch>
<FilesMatch "\.(css.gz|css.gzip)$">
  ForceType text/css
</FilesMatch>

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/index\.php
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/ow_updates/index\.php
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/ow_updates/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/ow_cron/run\.php
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/e500\.php
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/captcha\.php
#RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} (/|\.php|\.html|\.htm|\.xml|\.feed|robots\.txt|\.raw|/[^.]*)$  [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} (/|\.php|\.htm|\.feed|robots\.txt|sitemap\.xml|\.raw|/[^.]*)$  [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) index.php

This is my redirect:

Redirect /photo/useralbums /my-profile

The result is that the user ends up at: /my-profile/Mario

Answer 1

Redirect /photo/useralbums /my-profile

The result is that the user ends up at: /my-profile/Mario

This will happen if the request is for /photo/useralbums/Mario since the mod_alias Redirect directive is prefix-matching and everything after the match is copied onto the end of the target URL.

If you need to redirect all URLs of the form /photo/useralbums/<username> to /my-profile then you will either need to use the mod_alias RedirectMatch directive, which matches using a regex and is not prefix-matching, or use a mod_rewrite RewriteRule directive. Since you are already using mod_rewrite for an internal rewrite you should use the mod_rewrite RewriteRule directive for the redirect as well in order to avoid potential future conflicts. (Different Apache modules run independently and at different times during the request. mod_rewrite always runs before mod_alias despite the apparent order of directives in your .htaccess file.)

Redirects should generally go before internal rewrites, so try the following instead before your existing mod_rewrite directives:

RewriteRule ^photo/useralbums(/[\w-]*)?$ /my-profile [R,L]

Note there is no slash prefix on the RewriteRule pattern.

The above will redirect /photo/useralbums, /photo/useralbums/ or /photo/useralbums/<username> (but not /photo/useralbums/<username>/something) to /my-profile. Where <username> can consist of the characters a-z, A-Z, 0-9, _ or -.

However, this doesn't determine whether the user is "logged in" or not, as suggested in your question, since the redirect is unconditional.