Apache mod_rewrite & CodeIgniter

This article isn’t really about CodeIgniter. I’m getting to grips with that at the moment, so I might write some more about it in the future. It is about Apache’s mod_rewrite module and trying to get it to work in a way that’s useful on a dev server for the way CodeIgniter (and other PHP) projects are set out.

What I wanted was to have a single server (i.e. one virtual host) with space for several different projects, or branches of a project. In my opinion, the easiest way to access each project is just to use http://server/project/ in the browser (there are other ways – notably virtual hosts – but they usually require configuration for each new project and / or each new dev machine). With simple websites, it’s fine to put each project in a sub-folder and access them as suggested. However, that does ignores a recommendation for CI projects and one that I think should be followed on any web project and that is to move code that does not need to be publicly accessible outside of the browsable section of your file system (in this case, CI’s “system” and “application” folders should be outside “webroot”, or whatever you want to call it).

My goal was to have the dev server set up so projects could be moved between it and a production server without modification and to have each project wholly contained in its own folder, which means that each project needs its own “webroot” and its own space outside “webroot”. I therefore want every request to //server/project/index.php to be rewritten to //server/project/webroot/index.php (and of course similar for other files in other folders below webroot): in essence, “webroot” needs to be injected after every project name. This means that files and folders other than "webroot" in the project folder become inaccessible to the browser, which isn’t just a matter of convenience for the developer, it means that no resources can be accidentally accessed outside the correct area of the web server’s file system and all relative links (stylesheets, images, etc.) must be properly located.

The first thing I learned is to put the rules directly in the <virtual host> section and not in a <directory> tag wherever possible. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, it’s more efficient – Apache deals with rewriting much faster if it’s not done on a per-folder basis which is because of (at least in part) the second reason, which is that <directory> entries (and .htaccess files in particular directories, which are equivalent) can be parsed multiple times as the request is processed. This can cause major headaches for the unwary because there’s nothing to stop Apache deciding it needs to run through the rules again (in fact, it always seems to do so if the URL has been rewritten) and rather than starting with the original URL, you get the modified one. This means that you can get into an infinite loop if you, say, simply add something on to the end of whatever URL comes in.

The difference between behaviour for rules located in different sections of the config file is not limited to multiple passes, unfortunately. The other thing that changes is the content of some of the variables that you can make use of in the rules. For this reason it is important to check (and potentially modify) any rules you see suggested unless you’re sure that the rules were designed to go in the same place that you want to put them.

I ended up with the following, the second part of which adds index.php after project names (if not present), whilst retaining the rest of the URL as parameters. It’s based on examples in the CodeIgniter documentation:

# Inject 'webroot/' if request starts with a valid folder
# and '/webroot' is not already 2nd folder
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}$1 -d
RewriteCond $2 !/webroot
RewriteRule ^(/[^/]+)(/?[^/]*)(.*) $1/webroot$2$3

# Rewrite any */webroot/* file request to index.php
# Don't rewrite if file exists OR it's already
# index.php (even if 404)
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}%{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !/index\.php$
RewriteRule ^(/[^/]+/webroot)/?(.*)$ $1/index.php/$2

I've used %{REQUEST_FILENAME} in conditions for the second rule. Although there are several other variables with similar content, be careful which you choose to use in situations like that above: not only do the values of some of them change depending on the location of the rules within the Apache config files, but I found that some of them had their contents rewritten by earlier rules and some did not (and I found no reference to this in the mod_rewrite documentation).