MacOS – How to configure Apache for XAMPP on Mac OS X Lion to use mod_rewrite

apachemacmacoswebserver

I am totally newbie when it comes to .htaccess or Apache. I don't know how it works.

My URLs are like http://localhost/category.php?category=something and I'd like to get the variable value as something in category.php but I'd like to show the URL as http://localhost/something

How can I do this? Please help. Thank you in advance.

Best Answer

I haven't tested this exact string but in your htaccess file you can try:

Options +FollowSymLinks

RewriteEngine On

 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^(.*&)category=([^&]+)(&.*)?$ [NC]

 RewriteRule ^category\.php$ /%2? [R=301,L]

How familiar are you with regular expressions? That's probably the biggest hurdle to get over with mod_rewrite.

This particular version is intended to work for multiple parameters (optionally) and category can be first or not first. The other parameters if present are just discarded -- they still sent to your php code, just don't appear in URL.

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MacOS – Enable URL rewriting (mod_rewrite) using .htaccess files in ~/Sites on Lion

You should make sure that in your /etc/apache2/users/username.conf you have the following:

<Directory "/Users/username/Sites/">
    Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymlinks
    AllowOverride All
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Directory>

The FollowSymlinks and AllowOverride are essential here. While you are hinting at both in your question, maybe you did not configure these correctly in tandem.

Make sure in httpd.conf /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-userdir.conf is included as well. It is by default.

After any modifications, restart the web server for the changes to take effect.

If you are still having problems, maybe there is a problem with your actual rewrite rules. Were you using them in a .htaccess context before as well? Note that in a .htaccess, the rewrite rule regex is matched against a request URI without the leading slash and always relative to the directory where the .htaccess resides, whereas in a global httpd.conf the URI must match with a leading slash and is relative to the web root. Because assumedly you have your .htaccess in a subdirectory of ~/Sites, your rewrite rules might behave different from when the .htaccess resides in the web root of a (virtual) host.

To debug mod_rewrite you can enable rewrite logging. You should enable that in /etc/apache2/httpd.conf:

RewriteLogLevel 3
RewriteLog /path/to/rewrite.log

macOS – Fix Apache 2 UserDir Issues After Upgrading to Mountain Lion

It seems that the Apache configuration files in /etc/apache2 are not at all considered by the Apache version provided by the Server application.

With the Server application, all configurations are in /Library/Server/Web/Config/apache2

As the ReadMe.txt of this directory says, the default apache configuration file is httpd_server_app.conf, and I just had to uncomment the line Include /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-userdir.conf in this file!

problem solved.

[EDIT] As notified by Kristopher Johnson, it may also be necessary to uncomment LoadModule apple_userdir_module

Best Answer

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MacOS – Enable URL rewriting (mod_rewrite) using .htaccess files in ~/Sites on Lion

macOS – Fix Apache 2 UserDir Issues After Upgrading to Mountain Lion

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