mod rewrite negative match not working

Trying to stop re-writing of actual files/directories

[trillianjedi]

Hi gang!

Been a while since I had one of these issues, but I'm on holiday so building something for fun as my office won't allow me to write code anymore :)

I'm playing with a REST-ful API that has a website on the same server and I want to match the first directory and map that to a .php file. I want to ignore everything else, so my static html, php, cs, js etc files remain as is. EG:-

https://example.com/123-abc/ . <-- gets mod_rewritten to https://example.com/myfile.php?q=123-abc

BUT

https://example.com/js/jquery.js <-- does not get mod_rewritten because it's an actual file that really exists

After some googling, thinking and trial and error I came up with this:-

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
LogLevel alert rewrite:trace6
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /myfile.php?q=$1 [L,QSA]

I believe the RewriteRule is working correctly because the matches that I did want to catch are working.

However, all my javascript, css etc is getting matched and re-written too.

My intention/understanding was that these two lines:-

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

... would prevent from re-writing the existing files and existing directories.

I slept on this to see if I could spot my mistake in the morning, but I can't. I'm hoping someone here can :)

Thanks!

PS - I don't know if it makes a difference, but I haven't put this in .htaccess - I have put it in my apache default-ssl config file.

[phranque]

try this:

Options -MultiViews
https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/core.html#options

i don't think this is your problem but you might also need this:

AcceptPathInfo Off
https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/core.html#acceptpathinfo

you might also want a preceding RewriteCond to exclude requests for myfile.php from being further processed by the ruleset.

[lucy24]

Whenever possible, avoid the !f and !d tests, since the server has to perform these tests on every single request. Instead, have something like this before the CMS-or-whatever rewrite code:

RewriteRule \.(js|css|jpg|png|ico)$ - [L]

listing any extension (case sensitive) that actually exists on your site. This will not prevent the server from returning a 404 further down the line if it turns out you goofed and some particular non-page file really doesn't exist. It will just stop mod_rewrite from getting involved.