Help with Apache mod_rewrite rules

Question

I want to change some legacy URL's like this:

/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=600

to this:

/news/story/600/

This is what I have tried:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^name=News&file=([a-z_]+)&sid=([0-9]+)
RewriteRule ^modules\.php /news/story/%2/ [R=301,L]

However I still get 404's on the old URLs.

I do have some other rewrite rules working, so I am pretty sure mod_rewrite is enabled and functioning. These rules are in a httpd.conf file in a VirtualHost container.

I should also mention this is for a Python application (using Django) running with mod_wsgi. Should the rewrites happen before the URLs are passed to the wsgi application?

Any ideas? Thanks.

Answer 1

I got it to work. It seems I had a couple of problems.

1. I needed a forward slash on the pattern in RewriteRule; i.e.
   ^/modules.php instead of ^modules.php.

2. I needed to prevent the query string from being appended to the new URL. This could cause recursion in some cases, or other strange things (400 bad request). A trailing ? did the trick.

I ended up with this:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} sid=([0-9]+)
RewriteRule ^/modules\.php /news/story/%1/? [R=301,L]

Answer 2

Where are these "other rewrite rules" located? In the same .conf or .htaccess file? I think you need Options +FollowSymlinks on the line just above RewriteEngine on.