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I have a .htaccess file with one simple RewriteRule:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z0-9-]+)$ ?site=$1

I want to have a URL like http://www.example.com/imprint and forward it to http://www.example.com/?site=imprint.

I checked this rule with a RewriteRule tester which gave me the results I want to achieve. On my local development server it works well too.

But on a remote server the URLs just give me a 404 error. Other more simple rewrite rules are working with no problems, so everything must be set up correctly (I think..). The problem is that I don't have access to any error logs or the server configs. So the only thing I can do is to guess...

Can anyone tell me if there's something wrong with this rule? Or anything else I can do or test to solve this? Or has someone an idea what could be wrong on the server?

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  • 1
    Does the remote server allow overrides with .htaccess? Is mod_rewrite enabled?
    – ionFish
    Mar 30, 2012 at 15:28
  • It must be. I can't check it in the configs but like I said, if I use another more simple rule e.g. redirect every pagecall to www.google.com it works.
    – m0tv
    Apr 2, 2012 at 7:08

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
2

Try slash before the ?, like

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z0-9-]+)$ /?site=$1

If that doesnt work, try adding [R] after $1 so it will actually rewrite the url and you can see where it goes in your browser url bar

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  • Thank you very much. The slash works like a charm. Without the slash and adding the [R] I get redirected to the whole filesystem path like www.example.com/www/hosting/XXX/XXX/websites/example/?site=imprint Can you explain this behaviour to me? Why does it work on other servers but not on this one? Is there some configuration for that?
    – m0tv
    Sep 21, 2012 at 8:58
  • what are the 2 server environments? As in like WAMP vs Linux? Apache versions the same? Maybe one has RewriteBase / in .htaccess and the other doesn't? Or maybe one of the DocumentRoot in httpd.conf (or vhosts) contains a trailing slash at the very end of the folder path where as the other doesn't? Honestly I learned starting out redirect urls should always start with / if not full http:// path, so I can't really speak to the expected behavior of non / urls like you originally had because I never use them...
    – WebChemist
    Sep 21, 2012 at 9:29
  • Hm ok, many things can be the cause for this behaviour. I just try to accustom myself to always write the redirect URLs with a trailing slash.
    – m0tv
    Sep 21, 2012 at 9:50
  • I found this tutorial (especially part 2) particularly helpful when I first started playing around with htaccess, hopefully you or anyone reading this finds it helpful as well: corz.org/serv/tricks/htaccess.php
    – WebChemist
    Sep 21, 2012 at 17:49

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