Redirect loop issue with mod_rewrite php script

Question

I have a .htaccess file with the following rules:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?route=$1 [L,QSA]

In the index.php I have:

$route = (isset($_GET['route'])?explode('/',$_GET['route']):null);

if(!empty($route)){
    $route[0]; //movie
    //$route[1]; //movie-name

    header("Location: " . "http://192.167.1.189/site_name/movie/" . $route[1]);
    // $route[1] = 2271 (movie id)
    exit;
}

The goal is to get from this url:

http://192.167.1.189/site_name/movie-page.php?id=2270

to this url:

http://192.167.1.189/site_name/movie/2270

I will also want some other url changes such as .../movie-page.php to .../movie/ and so on...

I understand why I get the redirect loop, but I don't know how to fix it. How can I redirect all (except valid files and directories such as css files and images) to a central php file and then redirect to the user friendly url?

Answer 1

I understand why I get the redirect loop, but I don't know how to fix it. How can I redirect all (except valid files and directories such as css files and images) to a central php file and then redirect to the user friendly url?

So it sounds like this is what you're trying to do:

1. Browser requests a friendly URL
2. Rewrite Rules in .htaccess rewrite the friendly to the one with the ?route= query string
3. The index.php script takes the request, and processes it, and gives the browser what it wants

But you want to also do:

1. Browser requests an ugly URL with the ?route= query string
2. Rewrite Rules do nothing because the URI doesn't match
3. The index.php script takes the request, sees that it's an ugly URL, and redirects the browser to the friendly one.

In order to do this, you need to check in your script what the origially requested URL looked like. You can do it by looking at the $_SERVER['REQUEST_URL'] or the $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] variables. They should tell you the URI of what the browser actually requested.

For example, if someone puts in their URL address bar in their browser the URL: http://192.167.1.189/site_name/movie/2270, then the rewrite rule will route that to index.php and then in your php file you can check the $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] and it will say: /site_name/movie/2270.

But if someone puts in their URL address bar: http://192.167.1.189/site_name/movie-page.php?id=2270, then the $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] will be /site_name/movie-page.php?id=2270. So maybe you want something like this in your if statement:

if(!empty($route) && 
   strpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], "site_name/movie/") != 1
  ){

So you want to make sure there's something in the $route var and that the $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] var doesn't start with /site_name/movie/.