I have these three links:
localhost/my_projects/my_website.php
localhost/my_projects/my_website.html
localhost/my_projects/my_website
The paths of the php and html files are as follows:
C:\xampp\htdocs\my_projects\my_website.php
C:\xampp\htdocs\my_projects\my_website.html
The link without an extension is "artificial" and I want to use said link:
localhost/my_projects/my_website
to get the contents of either of these links:
localhost/my_projects/my_website.php
localhost/my_projects/my_website.html
The reason for the two example files, instead of just one, is that I want to be able to switch between those two files when I edit the htaccess file. Obviously I only want to access one of those files at a time.
What do I need to have in my .htaccess file inside the my_projects folder to accomplish that? How can I make one specific link redirect to another specific link?
After reading your comment clarifying your folder structure I corrected the RewriteRule. (By the way, it would be best if you add that info to the question itself instead of in comments).
The url you want to target is: http://localhost/my_projects/my_website
http:// is the protocol
localhost is your domain (it could also be 127.0.0.1 or a domian name like www.example.com in the Internet)
I assume you are running Apache on port 80, otherwise in the url you need to also specify the port. For port 8086 for example it would be http://localhost:8086/my_projects/my_website.
The real path is htdocs/my_projects/my_website.php or htdocs/my_projects/my_website.html depending on your needs (obviously both won't work at the same time).
Here the my_projects in the "fake" url collides with the real folder "my_projects" so Apache will go for the folder and see there is no my_website (with no extension) document there (it won't reach the rewrite rules).
There is a question in SO that provides a work around for this, but it is not a perfect solution, it has edge cases where the url will still fail or make other urls fail. I had posted it yesterday, but I seem not to find it now.
The simple solution if you have the flexibility for doing it is to change the "fake" url for it not to collide with the real path.
One option is for example to replace the underscores with hyphens.
Then you would access the page as http://localhost/my-projects/my-website if you want to keep a sort of "fake" folder structure in the url. Otherwise you could simply use http://localhost/my-website.
Here are both alternatives:
# This is for the directory not to be shown. You can remove it if you don't mind that happening.
Options -Indexes
RewriteEngine On
#Rule for http://localhost/my-projects/my-website
RewriteRule ^my-projects/my-website(.+)?$ my_projects/my_website.php$1 [NC,L]
#Rule for http://localhost/my-website
RewriteRule ^my-website(.+)?$ my_projects/my_website.php$1 [NC,L]
(Don't use both, just choose one of these two, or use them to adapt it to your needs)
The first part the rewrite rule is the regular expression for your "fake" url, the second part is the relative path of your real folder structure upto the page you want to show.
In the regular expression we capture whatever what we assume to be possible query parameters after .../my_website, and paste it after my_website.php in the second part of the rule (the $1).
Later on if you want to point the url to my_website.html, you have to change the second part of the rule, where it says .php, replace it by .html.
By the way, it is perfectly valid and you'll see it in most SEO friendly web sites to write an url as http://www.somesite.com/some-page-locator, and have a rewrite rule that translates that url to a page on the website, which is what I had written in my first answer.
I'm trying to create friendly url for my site but with no success :(( and i have two questions
The first is:
How to change the url from domain.com/page/something.php to domain.com/something
And the second is:
Will the changes make duplicate content and if how to fix the problem.
Thank you for your time,
Have a nice day
Check out the official URL Rewriting guide: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/misc/rewriteguide.html
You'll be using the simplest use case, Canonical URLs. Assuming you have no other pages that you need to worry about, you can use a rule like this: (note: untested, your usage may vary)
RewriteRule ^/(.*)([^/]+)$ /$1$2.php
While that example might not exactly work for your use case, hopefully reading the guide and my example will help you get you on your way.
I have a networking site that has member data organised into subfolders. To access the data, a user would need to go to something like:-
www.domain.com/members/so/me/on/esfolder
My question is, can I use a function in the .htaccess file to allow users to visit the same page by just typing:-
www.domain.com/members/someonesfolder
I have read up on the Rewrite syntax but struggling to understand how to do this. It is simply a case of removing the forward slashes after a particular point.
Any ideas? Thanks in advance.
I've figured it out myself after a non-stop mess around lasting several hours... For those who might want to know, here is the code I used...
RewriteRule ^members/([A-Za-z0-9]{1,2})([A-Za-z0-9]{1,2})([A-Za-z0-9]{1,}) members/$1/$2/$3/ [L]
In the above, there is just three sub-folder drill downs (which is what I have decided to do rather than the four in my original question).
Hope this helps someone else!
I'm trying to redirect a bunch of pages from one domain to another (not all the pages, just part of them).
The URL of a page is domain.com/?p=ID
ID is always a number.
I'd like to redirect all pages with IDs under 2000 a new domain, say domain2.com/?=ID
How can I do it? I'll probably have to use REGEX patterns, but I'm not that savvy when it comes to REGEX.
Thanks,
Roy
It is probably possible to do with a regex but regex is not really suited to doing ranges like that. Another way to do it could be to use a RewriteMap in your Apache conf like so:
RewriteMap examplemap txt:/path/to/file/map.txt
RewriteRule ^/?p=(.*) ${examplemap:$1|/?p=$1}
Your /path/to/file/map.txt file would then contain something like:
1 http://domain2.com/?p=1
2 http://domain2.com/?p=2
3 http://domain2.com/?p=3
.
.
2000 http://domain2.com/?p=2000
If the entry is not found in the map file then it should default to the existing domain because of the part after the pipe in the RewriteRule. This might seem like an overkill but it gives you the finest level of control over each redirect.
The above code has not been tested but hopefully it explains the principal. See the Apache docs for more information on using RewriteMap.
I want to redirect every post 301 redirect, but I have over 3000 posts.
If I list
Redirect permanent /blog/2010/07/post.html http://new.blog.com/2010/07/23/post/
Redirect permanent /blog/2010/07/post1.html http://new.blog.com/2010/07/24/post1/
Redirect permanent /blog/2010/07/post2.html http://new.blog.com/2010/07/25/post2/
Redirect permanent /blog/2010/07/post3.html http://new.blog.com/2010/07/26/post3/
Redirect per......
for over 3000 url redirect command in .htaccess would this eat my server resource or cause some problem? Im not sure how .htaccess work but if the server is looking at these lists each time user requests for page, I would guess it will be a resource hog.
I can't use RedirectMatch because I added date variable in my new url. Do you have any other suggestions redirecting these posts? Or am I just fine?
Thanks!
I am not an Apache expert, so I cannot speak to whether or not having 3,000 redirects in .htaccess is a problem (though my gut tells me it probably is a bad idea). However, as a simpler solution to your problem, why not use mod_rewrite to do your redirects?
RewriteRule ^/blog/(.+)/(.+)/(.+).html$ http://new.blog.com/$1/$2/$3/ [R=permanent]
This uses a regex to match old URLs and rewrite them to new ones. The [R=permanent] instructs mod_rewrite to issue a 301 with the new URL instead of silently rewriting the request internally.
In your example, it looks like you've added the day of the post to the URL, which does not exist in the old URL. Since you obviously cannot use a regexp to divine the day an arbitrary post was made, this method may not work for you. If you can drop the day from the URL, then you're good to go.
Edit: The first time I read your question, I missed the last paragraph. ("I can't use RedirectMatch because I added date variable in my new url.") In this case, you can use mod_rewrite's RewriteMap to lookup the day component of a post.
You have two options:
Use a hashmap to perform fast lookups in a static file. This means all your old URLs will work, but any new posts cannot be accessed using the old URL scheme.
Use a script to grab the day.
In option one, create a file called posts.txt and put:
/yyyy/mm/pppp dd
...for each post where yyyy is the year of the post, mm is the month, and pppp is the post name (without the .html).
When you're done, run:
$ httxt2dbm -i posts.txt -o posts.map
Then we add to to the server/virtual server config: (Note the path is a filesystem path, not a URL.)
RewriteMap postday dbm:/path/to/file/posts.map
RewriteRule ^/blog/(.+)/(.+)/(.+).html$ http://new.blog.com/$1/$2/${postday:$1/$2/$3}/$3/ [R=permanent]
In option two, use pgm:/path/to/script/lookup.whatever as your RewriteMap. See the mod_rewrite documentation for more info about using a script.
Doing the lookup in mod_rewrite is better than just redirecting to a script which looks up the date and then redirects to the final destination because you should never redirect more than once. Issuing a 301 or 302 incurs a round trip cost, which increases the latency of your page load time.
If you have some way in code to determine the day of a post, you can generate the rewrite on the fly. You can setup a mod_rewrite pattern, something like .html and set up a front controller pattern to calculate the new url from the old and issue the 301 header.
With php as an example:
$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']
will contain the requested url and
header("Location: http://new.blog.com/$y/$m/$d/$title/",TRUE,301);
will send a redirect.
That's... a lot of redirects. But the first thing I would tell you, and probably the only thing I can tell you without qualification, is that you should run some tests and see what the access times for your blog are like, and also look at the server's CPU and memory usage while you're doing it. If they're fairly low even with that giant list of redirects, you're okay as long as your blog doesn't experience a sudden increase in traffic. (I strongly suspect the 3000 rewrites will be slowing Apache down a lot, though)
That being said, I would second josh's suggestion of replacing the redirects with something dynamic. Like animuson said, if you're willing to drop the day from the URL, it'll be easy to set up a RewriteRule directive to handle the redirection. Otherwise, you could do it with a PHP script, or generally some code in whatever scripting language you (can) use. If you're using one of the popular blog engines, it probably contains code to do this already. Basically you could do something like
RewriteRule .* /blog/index.php
and just let the PHP script sort out which post was requested. It has access to the database so it'll be able to do that, and then you can either display the post directly from the PHP script, or to recover your original redirection behavior, you can send a Location header with the correct URL.
An alternative would be to use RewriteMap, which lets you write a RewriteRule where the target is determined by a program or file of your choice instead of being directly specified in the configuration file. As one option, you can specify a text file that contains the old and new URLs, and Apache will handle searching the file for the appropriate line for any given request. Read the documentation (linked above) for the full details. I will mention that this isn't used very often, and I'm not sure how much faster it would be compared to just having 3000 redirects.
Last tip: Apache can be significantly faster if you're able to move the configuration directives (like Redirect) into the server or virtual host configuration file, and disable reading of .htaccess entirely. I would guess that moving 3000 directives from .htaccess into the virtual host configuration could make your server considerably faster. But even moving the directives into the vhost config file probably wouldn't produce as much of a speedup as using a single RewriteRule.
It's never a good idea to make a massive list of Redirects. A better programming technique is to simply redirect the pages without that date variable then have a small PHP snippet that detects if it's missing and redirects to the URL with it included. The long list looks tacky and slows down Apache because it's checking that URL (any every other URL that might not even be affected by this) against each line. If it were only 5 or so, I'd say fine, but 3,000 is a definite NO.
Although I'm not a big fan of this method, a better choice would be to redirect all those URLs normally using a single match statement, redirecting them to the page without the date part, or with a dash or something, then include a small PHP snippet to check if the date is valid and if not, rewrite the path again to the correctly formed URL.
Honestly, if you didn't have that part there before, you don't need it now, and it will probably just confuse the search engines changing the URL for 3,000 posts. You don't really need a date in the URL, a good title is much more meaningful not only to users, but also to search engines, than a bunch of numbers.