I recently happened across this issue myself. There is a difference between using RewriteRule
in the VirtualHost and as part of an .htaccess file. The following rule will match (with a URL like this: example.com/fruit/apple
) if it appears in a .htaccess file:
RewriteRule ^(fruit|fruits)/apple http://newfruitwebsite.com$1 [R=301,L]
but will not match in the VirtualHost context. If we check out the apache docs we can see that:
When using the rewrite engine in .htaccess files the per-directory prefix is automatically removed for the RewriteRule pattern matching and automatically added after any relative (not starting with a slash or protocol name) substitution encounters the end of a rule set.
...but what does this mean? The above rule would not match the same URL if it was placed into the VirtualHost because it doesn't allow a leading slash (/
) to be at the start of the string. The apache docs go on to say:
The removed prefix always ends with a slash, meaning the matching occurs against a string which never has a leading slash. Therefore, a Pattern with ^/ never matches in per-directory context.
...so if we need a slash for .htaccess and no slash for VirtualHost, how do we modify the pattern? You guessed it. We need to add /?
to add the following condition in our regex (where our question mark (?
) is the quantifier):
- Has between 0 and 1
/
at the beginning of the string.
Now our URL (example.com/fruit/apple
) string will match because we are handling the fact that if the rule is in the .htaccess file it will have 0
slashes and if it comes from the virtualHost it will have 1
slashes.
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