What is mod_rewrite?
Mod_rewrite is a rewriting engine (based on regular-expressions) built into the apache webserver and it is used to rewrite urls dynamically. The URL manipulations can depend on various tests, of server variables, environment variables, HTTP headers, or time stamps. Even external database lookups in various formats can be used to achieve highly granular URL matching.
How to install it
Apache by default comes with the mod_rewrite module installed but it is not enabled. So if you have Apache installed on your own server, you will need to enable it.
If you need to install apache on your system, there are many free, easy install packages available:
Xamp - http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html
apache2triad - http://apache2triad.net/
apachePHPMysql - http://apachephpmysql.narhoz.ru/
EasyWebServer - http://e.w.s.free.fr/index_fr.php
FoxServ - http://sourceforge.net/projects/foxserv/
Setting it up
Once installed, mod_rewrite basically relies on one file for all it’s functionality. It’s called .htaccess. This file should be placed in the root directory of your website.
A simple Redirect
Place the following in a .htaccess file:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^test\.html$ test2.html
RewriteEngine on should always be placed at the beginning of all your .htaccess files.
Note: If you are using a hosting provider, you may have to place the following line in your file (under rewrite_engine on): RewriteBase /
Script details:
- ^ is used before a URL. If a relative URL is used, it starts in the same directory as the .htaccess file
- $ is used for the end of a string that will be matched.
- \ is used to escape the period, periods need the \ before them if they are not going to be part of the actual rule (in this case, it is part of the filename).
This script will redirect all access from test.html to test2.html. IE: if a user goes to http://www.yoursite.com/test.html, they will be automatically forwarded to http://www.yoursite.com/test2.html
Other interesting uses
A) Blocking a specific Ip addressing from accessing your website.
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^(W\.X\.Y\.Z)$
RewriteRule ^/* http://www.yoursite.com/sorry.htm [L]
Replace w.x.y.z with the IP you would like to block and http://www.yoursite.com/sorry.htm with the redirected URL.
B) Block/redirect a site that is linking to you
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://www\.blockedsite\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^/* http://www.yoursite.com/sorry.htm [L]
Replace http://www.blockedsite.com/ with site you do not want linking to you, and http://www.yoursite.com/sorry.htm with the redirected URL.
C) preventing people from linking to your images
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?yoursite\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.*$
RewriteRule \.(png |gif | bmp | jpe?g|)$ /images/stopstealing.png [L]
Replace http://www.blockedsite.com/ your site, and /images/stopstealing.png with an image path of choice.
Full Apache Docs: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_rewrite.html
By Justin Silverton
For the past couple of days I’ve been in (rainy|sunny) Seattle attending a web development summit hosted on the Microsoft campus in Redmond. Microsoft invited a number of “influentials” from web development communities outside of the usual MS camps; the folks attending were mostly of a PHP background, but there was one Rails guy and a couple of others with more of a .Net background.
At first you’d think that MS had set out to brainwash us all into talking about how great their new bits are. While that was true to a certain extent, they were very keen to find out what we all thought about those bits–did they suck? how could they be improved? and so on.
For me, the more interesting parts included:
Feature focus on IIS7
The IIS7 that will ship with Vista is designed to make things easier for a web developer. There are some innovations like per-directory configuration files called web.config files. These are effectively an XML equivalent to Apache .htaccess files and will make things much easier for transporting configuration from a local dev box up to a staging or even production server. The IIS guys re-engineered the core of IIS to run in a modular fashion, making it much easier to build in custom authentication or URL rewriting facilities, for example.
This may not sound like a big deal to apache users, but it’s a significant stride in the right direction as far as feature parity between apache and IIS is concerned–it makes it easier to create an app that will run “the same” on IIS as it does on Apache.
Original post by wez+via_rss@netevil.org (Wez Furlong)
I’d had enough.
Being unhappy with the current wisdom and distrustful of our browsers, I wanted to have the font sizing options laid out so i could see where they did and didn’t work. So I made 264 screenshots.
This collection is posted for anyone else who is unhappy and distrustful.
By Browser. This one has everything. Clips from the main browsers of all of the above methods, plus all five size setting from the three IE PC’s.
By Method. This is useful for looking for anomalies.
IE PC. Grouped by the three IE PC’s five size settings. Also good for looking for anomalies. There’s a couple of subtle ones.
Individual Methods. Because I was going snow-blind trying to see things on the big chart, I thought it would be nice to have them on individual pages too. Source for the screenshots is linked through here as well.
Conclusions? For me, yes: take a look over here for the method I currently use.
Another php|works is done. As always, Marco puts together a good conference. An interesting mix of speakers and attendees, a good selection of talks and some fun activities–the PHP trivia quiz was fun to watch (speakers were not allowed to compete) with some tough questions and a great prize (a brand new macbook!).
The extending PHP session I was covering for Sara seemed to go ok; in my experience there’s typically only 1 or 2 people that are seriously following the content in these sessions, with the rest either snoozing or feeling overwhelmed. It is a tough topic to cover, even in 3 hours. I used Sara’s slides, but the pacing was a bit aggressive, so we wound up spending a bit more time doing some real time extension hacking instead of following the slides too closely.
The PDO talk was the same as usual, and my new talk, on best mailing practices (affectionately known as “not PDO” by the rest of the speakers) had a decent turn-out with people actually scribbling down notes.
I think I only managed to attend two other talks; Sebastians AOP talk (although I had to cut out pretty early to make a phone call) and Zak’s talk on licensing, which very clearly explained things like copyright and licensing that every developer should know.
On my return journey, I had the pleasure of meeting Eli White (PHP Hacker @ Digg, author of “PHP 5 in Practice”) at the gate for the flight back home. By a strange quirk of fate I hadn’t seen Eli at all at the conference, but with ample time at the gate, and on the plane (another quirk of fate had us sitting next to each other), we made up for that.
You can find my PDO and Mail talks up at the OmniTI talks page: http://omniti.com/resources/talks and you can find the extending PHP slides up at http://netevil.org/talks/furlong-golemon-extending-php.pdf.
Original post by wez+via_rss@netevil.org (Wez Furlong)
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