Clean URLs in IIS with mod_rewrite

Question

I have a mod_rewrite issue. Or more accurately, I have an issue with ISAPI_Rewrite, which is a mod_rewrite clone for IIS. Specifically, ISAPI_Rewrite v3 running on IIS 7. It aims to behave identically to mod_rewrite, so I hope my problem applies to mod_rewrite as well.

My problem boils down to this: I have a script bar.php which I want to access via the URL foo. I first rewrite foo to bar. Then try to convert the clean URL to a real file name.

RewriteRule ^foo$ bar

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.php -f
RewriteRule .* $0.php

The RewriteCond is failing because ${REQUEST_FILENAME} still says "foo" rather than "bar". It is not updated after the first rewrite.

How can I make this work? I could fix this by simply writing RewriteRule ^foo$ bar.php. But I would strongly prefer to keep the URL remapping rules separate from the file extension rules.

Answer 1

Tentative answer...

RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/$0.php -f

By using $0 I get access to the latest rewritten URL, which makes me happy. But I have to add %{DOCUMENT_ROOT} to turn that into a file name, which makes me sad. Bit of a kludge.