Using RewriteCond with %{REQUEST_URI} for mod_rewrite

Question

I would like the URL:

http://domain.com/category/subcategory/title

To point to:

http://domain.com/posts/category/subcategory/title.php

My .htaccess file looks like this:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !^.+
#RewriteCond post/%{REQUEST_URI}.php -f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ post/$1.php [L]

This works however when I uncomment the line above it does not work.

I have tried:

RewriteCond /post/%{REQUEST_URI}.php -f
RewriteCond post/%{REQUEST_URI}.php -f
RewriteCond post%{REQUEST_URI}.php -f

None of these work. What am I doing wrong?

Also is there an easy way to debug these rules? Like console logging variables or something?

score 6 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 17 '16 at 14:19

-f check requires full filesystem path. You can do this using %{DOCUMENT_ROOT} variable:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^$
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/post/$1.php -f
RewriteRule ^(.+)$ post/$1.php [L]

score 2 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:10

I guess you mean the line

RewriteCond post/%{REQUEST_URI}.php -f

REQUEST_URI is

The path component of the requested URI, such as "/index.html".

post/%{REQUEST_URI}.php is then some relative path from where the Apache web server is running. This might be the root directory /, Apache's configuration directory /etc/apache2, its document root /var/www/html, or even /var/tmp, or anything else.

/post/%{REQUEST_URI}.php
/etc/apache2/post/%{REQUEST_URI}.php
/var/www/html/post/%{REQUEST_URI}.php
/var/tmp/post/%{REQUEST_URI}.php
/home/olaf/post/%{REQUEST_URI}.php

As you see, you can't really know what file Apache will look at. And Apache might find a file at this place, or it may not. To be sure, you must provide an absolute path as @anubhava already suggested.

Using RewriteCond with %{REQUEST_URI} for mod_rewrite

2 Answers2