getting mod_rewrite to work on Mac OS X

Question

I'm trying to get mod rewrite to work on my Mac. This is the content of the .htaccess file:

<Files *\.ini>
  order allow,deny
  deny from all
</Files>

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule .* index.php

I know this is active, because it's blocking .ini files properly, and it seems to rewrite the fictional request /foo to index.php, as this is the error I'm seeing in the browser:

The requested URL /Users/rwel/Sites/dev/quaestio/index.php was not found on this server.

The index.php file currently just contains an exit statement for testing purposes, and it does work when calling it directly. So, the question is, what's going wrong? I went into the apache error log, and this is what I saw:

[Thu Nov 03 14:36:02 2011] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] File does not exist: /Library/WebServer/Documents/Users

So the problem might be that it's not searching in the root, but relative to the /Library/WebServer/Documents directory. Am I right? How can I fix this?

Answer 1

Since Rijk didn't want to answer their own question, the solution was they had to add this line into the .htaccess file.

RewriteBase /~rwel/dev/quaestio

Hope this helps someone else.

Answer 2

How about redirect to a simple html file and see if that works?

Also try using this syntax:

RewriteRule ^.*$ /index.php