Clean URLs with Apache - Page 1

In this tutorial, I'll show you how to switch from long URLs to short, clean URLs.
A basic understanding of how server-side languages work is recommended in order to
follow through.  Even though many websites are switching to clean URLs, most
websites that feature dynamically generated content use long URLs with query strings
in them, something like:

http://yoursite.com/index.php?cetegory=cooking&page=pasta&section=4

On the surface, you may be wondering what the real problem with that is. Sure, it doesn't look pretty, but does that really matter? It turns out, there are a few problems associated with such long, complicated URLs:

• They're not search engine friendly. Most search engine crawlers stop crawling
  when they come across query strings in the URL.
• Like mentioned earlier, they are hard to remember and don't look very nice.
• They usually reveal what kind of technology you use to display your site (like
  PHP or ASP). This makes your site easier to compromise, because it gives hackers insight into how it works.

Because of those three reasons (and others I'm sure!) it's better to have concise, clean and descriptive URLs. At the end of this tutorial, you will learn how to take those huge URL's and make them cleaner. The clean URLs will look like static URLs, but via mod rewriting, you still trick them into getting data for generating dynamic content.

So with mod rewriting you can switch from URLs like:
http://yoursite.com/index.php?category=cooking&page=pasta&section=4

To something like:
http://yoursite.com/cooking/pasta/4

But the best thing is, you'll still receive the GET information from your query strings like you did before. It's a win-win situation!

Let's Get to Work!
So how do we go about doing that? First, make sure that you are allowed to set
per-directory .htaccess files. If you're not sure about that, ask your host. Next, create a file called .htaccess in the directory where your site is. We'll assume that's the root (/) directory. That file should contain the following text:

# this is the initialization Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / # these are the rewrite conditions RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d # and finally, the rewrite rules RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9\-]+)/?$  /index.php?category=$1 [L,QSA] RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9\-]+)/([a-zA-Z0-9\-]+)/?$ /index.php?category=$1&page=$2 [L,QSA] RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9\-]+)/([a-zA-Z0-9\-]+)/([a-zA-Z0-9\-]+)/?$  /index.php?category=$1&page=$2§ion=$3 [L,QSA]

Let's stop here for a bit and look at what the above does. First there are a few
commands that set things up for us. They tell the server to follow symlinks, turn
on the rewrite engine and set the rewrite base to /.

Note

If you have your site in one directory, say /mysite/ but want it to be accessed without that, like it was in the root, set the base to /mysite/ Otherwise, just leave it at /

Also, if your index.php is not in the root folder (/) modify the above rewrite rules accordingly. So if your index.php is in /mysite/, the first rewrite rule should have /mysite/index.php?category=$1 instead of /index.php?category=$1

Then are the rewrite conditions. That is where we tell the server that, if the URL
someone has tried to access is an actual file or a directory, don't interpret it
via the rules but just return it to the client. That's good because otherwise
we'd have some problems with links, images etc.

Phew! It's time to take a breather. In the next page, let's pick up from where we left off and discuss the rewrite rule itself.

Onwards to the next page!

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