RewriteRule - remove root context

[arcing]

Looking for some help with what I would have thought shouldn't be too hard to achive, but this is the first time I've had to do it and I'm getting a little lost.

I have a few sites we have are all under a single context root, so:

www.domain.com/root/site1
www.domain.com/root/site2
www.domain.com/root/site3

I want users to be able to hit www.domain.com/site1 and be forwarded. If this can be done without changing the URL in the browser then even better.

I've got as far as:

RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ /root/$1 [PT]

This redirects the first page fine, but if you hit any links in the web page they obviously still have the original context root, so this rule adds /root to it again, and the page cannot be found:

www.domain.com/root/site1/page1 becomes www.domain.com/root/root/site1/page1 and 404s.

I'm obviously missing something fundamental but mod-rewrite seems like a mine field.

Thanks!

[g1smd]

The rewritten URL matches the rule and is rewritten again. That rewritten rule matches the rule and is rewritten again. Infinite loop.

That's because you used

.*

which matches "everything".

You need to make the pattern to be matched more exact and/or test

THE_REQUEST

in a

RewriteCond

to make sure that the requested URL was as a result of a client request, not as a result of a previous rewrite, or you could test that the URL does NOT contain "root".

[jdMorgan]

Just exclude requests for URL-paths starting with "root" from being rewritten:

RewriteCond $1 !^root/
RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ /root/$1 [PT,L]

Jim