RewriteRule: bootstrap to two different files

Hi.

I’ve got a .htaccess file in my web root. Using the .htaccess file I force every request through a single file (frontend.php). Here’s my .htaccess file:

 
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule .* frontend.php

Code (markup):

As mentioned above, using this .htaccess file every request is forced through frontend.php, so

 
http://www.mydomain.com/afile.php
http://www.mydomain.com/dirOne/dirTwo/
http://www.mydomain.com/index.php

Code (markup):

Will all run exactly the same script (frontend.php).

This works fine, however I want to write a rule to so every request made to an admin alias goes through a separate file (backend.php). So, for example the following URLs would all go through backend.php as they all contain the admin alias.

 
http://www.mydomain.com/admin/
http://www.mydomain.com/admin/dirOne/dirTwo/
http://www.mydomain.com/admin/index.php

Code (markup):

My problem is I’m unsure how to write this within my .htaccess file. Does anyone have any ideas! I’m completely stuck!

Jon

 

RewriteRule ^admin(.*) backend.php [L]
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !backend.php$
RewriteRule .* frontend.php [L]

Code (markup):

That may need a bit more work but it should be something like that.
Line 1: match all requests that begin with 'admin' and send to backend.php
Line 2: compare script name to backend - this condition is only met if we're not using backend.php
Line 3: send everything else to frontend.php

This is where the [L] (last) flag can become a little confusing. In theory, you might be able to miss out the middle line in the above - send all admin requests to backend.php, use the L flag to stop processing and on the next line if we're still running send everything else to the frontend.php

However, the L flag applies only to that request. So if we were to use just:

RewriteRule ^admin(.*) backend.php [L]
RewriteRule .* frontend.php [L]

Code (markup):

A request for admin/pie.php will be intercepted and rewritten to backend.php. The flag means we stop here for this request. mod_rewrite will now make a new request for the backend.php script - obviously the first rewriterule no longer applies but the second one does, so we in turn get rewritten again to frontend.php.

Obviously that's not what we want, so we introduce a condition to the second rewriterule. So we're now only doing that second rewrite if we're not requesting the backend.php file.

Hopefully that makes some sense.

 

Thanks for the reply.

I will use the code examples you have provided when I get home tonight to test them out.

Jon.

 

Thanks rodney88 - this worked very well.

Solved