Simon Willison’s Weblog

Learning Mod Rewrite was an eye opener for me. Suddenly I actually understood that a URL did not necessarily have to correspond to a script on the server, but could be complete abstracted to represent what ever the heck I wanted.

And of course their is that cool introductory quote - "Despite the tons of examples and docs, mod_rewrite is voodoo. Damned cool voodoo, but still voodoo. ''

Daniel Von Fange - 29th August 2003 13:26 - #

Geting complex Mod Rewrite tricks to work is one of my favorite things. One of the few computer things that still seems like magic to me.

I have a WebDAV enabled staging subdomain where I do I all of my client work. But I wanted each clients work to be it's own subdomain so all of their hrefs will match up just like they will on the live site. So I set up *.staging.mintchaos.com as a wildcard subdomain and used the following rewrite rule to make any clientx.staging.mintchaos.com pull from staging.mintchaos.com/clientx

RewriteEngine on RewriteMap lowercase int:tolower
RewriteCond ${lowercase:%{SERVER_NAME}} ^([a-z-]+)\.staging\.mintchaos\.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*) /home/mintch/www/staging/%1/$1

It's darned fun.

Xian - 29th August 2003 22:19 - #

A good set of examples makes all the difference in the world. I recently used mod_rewrite to rewrite some URLs for the sake of Google indexing (my archived posts have query strings in their URLs which I've read Googlebot doesn't like). I didn't know a thing about mod_rewrite (still taking baby steps at this point) but it does seem like voodoo to me ;)

MikeyC - 31st August 2003 00:48 - #

Rewriting for search purposes is nice to have too.

coda - 4th September 2003 11:00 - #