Mod_Rewrite Killing My Relative Links

Discussion in 'Apache' started by Adam_28, Feb 11, 2007.

  1. #1
    Hi guys,

    I have a problem with Mod_Rewrite, and I'm sure its been discussed before, but I can't find a solution to it.
    I work for a small company and we've developed our own custom CMS which works very well, however, when we attempted to port it to use Mod_Rewrite, things started going wrong.

    The .htaccess code is below:

    
    <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteEngine on
    RewriteBase /adam/webdev/company/site/
    RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z0-9/]+)([^/])$ $1$2/ [R]
    RewriteRule ^([A-Za-z0-9/]+)/$ index.php?page=$1 [L]
    </IfModule>
    
    Code (markup):
    Because we use a development server, not everything is stored in our root directory, so I've used RewriteBase to point to where the root directory of the clients site is being developed. This is rather annoying and requires a manual change to the .htaccess file everytime we begin to build a new site, and if our clients were to move their code from one server to another, they most likely wouldn't know to edit the .htaccess file.
    What I would like is something that allows Mod_Rewrite to interpret what directory the .htaccess file is in like so:
    RewriteBase $HTACCESS_LOCATION

    The other problem is with paths to images and javascript files etc.
    A typical URL would look like: http://www.mycompany.com/news/recent/
    where the root directory where the .htaccess file is located is: http://www.mycompany.com/ and the news/recent is sent to index.php as the page GET variable.

    The problem we have is that our entire code base previously used relative paths to images/files etc:
    ./images/dummy.jpg

    and now this won't work because we previously had URL's looking like this:
    http://www.mycompany.com/index.php?page=pagename

    What I think is happening, is that instead of looking for the images in the root directory like it did before (because index.php was always located there), it looks at the URL, sees /news/recent/ and looks for the files in the "recent" directory which of course doesn't exist, and hence doesn't find the files.

    Has anyone had this problem before? And if so, are there any suggestions on how to solve it?

    Thanks,
    Adam
     
    Adam_28, Feb 11, 2007 IP
  2. Nintendo

    Nintendo ♬ King of da Wackos ♬

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    #2
    Image codes have to be changed as if the URLs were the real URLs. Browsers don't know you're using mod_rewrite.
     
    Nintendo, Feb 12, 2007 IP
  3. rodney88

    rodney88 Guest

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    #3
    The default RewriteBase should be the directory containing the htaccess anyway - have you tried not explicitly setting it?

    You can only use relative image locations with rewritten URLs if you use the same structure and depth throughout your site (i.e. domain.com/section/pagename) - then you simply update your image locations to go up a directory. If you're not sure your best bet is to use absolute URLs instead.
     
    rodney88, Feb 12, 2007 IP
  4. Adam_28

    Adam_28 Peon

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    #4
    Hi guys, the fix is to include the "base" html tag in your head. This forces image paths to load correctly.

    Thanks for your help :)
     
    Adam_28, Feb 19, 2007 IP