In an application that heavily relies on .htaccess RewriteRules for its PrettyURLs (CakePHP in my case), how do I correctly set up directives to exclude certain directories from this rewriting? That is:
/appRoot/.htaccess
app/
static/
By default, every request to /appRoot/* is being rewritten to be picked up by app/webroot/index.php, where it's being analyzed and corresponding controller actions are being invoked. This is done by these directives in .htaccess:
RewriteBase /appRoot
RewriteRule ^$ app/webroot/ [L]
RewriteRule (.*) app/webroot/$1 [L]
I now want to exclude a few directories like static/ from this rewriting. I tried this before the Cake RewriteRules:
RewriteCond $1 ^(static|otherDir).*$ [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) - [L]
It works in so far that requests are no longer rewritten, but now all requests are being skipped, even legitimate Cake requests which should not match ^(static|otherDir).*$.
I tried several variations of these rules but can't get it to work the way I want.
And the correct answer iiiiis...
RewriteRule ^(a|bunch|of|old|directories).* - [NC,L]
# all other requests will be forwarded to Cake
RewriteRule ^$ app/webroot/ [L]
RewriteRule (.*) app/webroot/$1 [L]
I still don't get why the index.php file in the root directory was called initially even with these directives in place. It is now located in
/appRoot/app/views/pages/home.ctp
and handled through Cake as well. With this in place now, I suppose this would have worked as well (slightly altered version of Mike's suggestion, untested):
RewriteCond $1 !^(a|bunch|of|old|directories).*$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ app/webroot/$1 [L]