Thread: mod rewrite: how to rewrite "/"?

I have the following .htaccess on my development server (Apache2 under Ubuntu 10.10):

Options +FollowSymLinks
Options +Indexes
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/$ master.php?url=index.html [L]
RewriteRule ^(.+\.html)$ master.php?url=$1 [QSA,L]

This works fine on my own server and redirects all requests for .html files and "/" to master.php with the appropriate filename passed on the querystring. However, when I uploaded it to my GoDaddy hosting account I got 404s for requests for .html files and the content of index.php for "/". I solved the 404 errors by adding "Options -Multiviews" and "RewriteBase /", but I still got the content of index.php instead of master.php?url=index.html for "/".

Can anyone tell me what the first rewrite rule should be to redirect "/" to master.php?url=index.html?

TIA,

Geoff

My advice is to just use the cPanel protocols to build this redirect. It is a much faster option and you don't have to mess with all of these codes.
It does it all "behind the scenes".

Your best not to use a redirect to change the directory index, instead use this:

Code:

DirectoryIndex master.php?url=index.html

This will change the site so that when "/" is requested, master.php is retrieved. Not entirely sure if parameters work through this though, haven't checked but I don't see any reason they wouldn't.

As for why the redirect rule isn't working. I'd check with your hosting that mod_rewrite is active on your account.

Many thanks for the pointer to DirectoryIndex.

Mod rewrite is definitely active because I'm using it successfully except for that call to "/". GoDaddy seem to have their own rules in place with a succession of default pages in priority order, and there are several with greater priority than 'index.html'. I've temporarily resolved the matter by providing a top-priority page (default.html) that uses a meta refresh to redirect to index.html, but that's not ideal.

Hopefully,
DirectoryIndex master.php?url=index.html
will do the trick. If not, I should be able to rewrite master.php to return the required content for index.html in the case of no querystring.

Again thanks,

Geoff

Don't you just hate it when you've spent days searching the Internet in vain for the solution to a problem. All the information that searching returns tells you what you've already tried should have worked, but it doesn't. So you post a question on a forum hoping someone's been there when someone responds with GIYF

For completeness, the problem in my case is that GoDaddy already use mod rewrite to provide rules that define the default document and their rules took precedence over my attempt to explicitly rewrite "/". Using DirectoryIndex to locally define the default document as suggested upthread seems to have done the trick.

modrewrite is done through apache server.