Getting 404 Error When Rewriting URLs with .htacces

Question

I am trying to rewrite my URLs to have clean URLs. For example I want the following URL rewritten like so:

www.domain.com/events/events.php

www.domain.com/events/

It is rewritting the URL correctly but the rewritten URL is giving a 404 error. What am I doing wrong?

I am using the following rule:

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^(GET|POST)\ /(.*)/(.*)\.php\ HTTP
RewriteRule ^ http://www.domain.com/%3/? [R=301,L]

Answer 1

Once you've got the rules to externally redirect the browser, you then need to add rules to internally rewrite to the actual files. So you need to add:

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

Now, this rule takes a URI that looks like /(something)/ to /(something)/(something).php. So:

• /foo/ to /foo/foo.php
• /example/ to /example/example.php

etc.

There's no other info you're providing in the rewritten URI that tells you what the php filename is, so if you have something like this:

• /foo/bar.php

there's no way to extract the "bar" out of /foo/. You'd need to additionally encode that in the clean url:

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^(GET|POST)\ /(.*)/(.*)\.php\ HTTP
RewriteRule ^ http://www.domain.com/%2/%3/? [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/([^/]+)/?$ /$1/$2.php [L]