So I have this blog where I have two php files one serves as an index to all my blog posts
www.adityasastry.in/view.php?cat=1
the cat value stands for category I have three categories, programming, embedded systems and rant.
I want to change this something like www.adityasastry.in/1 should translate to www.adityasastry.in/view.php?cat=1
and another in the same directory(I can move this to a different directory if I want) which lets me view a particular blog post.
www.adityasastry.in/viewer.php?cno=32
I have indexed each of my blog posts with a number.
Ideally I want this to translate to www.adityasastry.in/1/32 if 32 is a blog post belonging to 1 category.
Please don't ask me what I have done cause I am not even sure this could be accomplished with PHP alone on a shared host !! I just selected couple of tags that I think are relavant to this.
http://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/an-in-depth-guide-to-mod_rewrite-for-apache--net-6708 - This is a good tutorial.
Basically-
Find the httpd.conf file for your server and uncomment the following line by removing the #:
# LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod\_rewrite.so
Create a file called .htaccess (no name, extension .htaccess) and open it in your code editor of choice and enter the following:
RewriteEngine on
Which enables the rewrite engine obviously. From there you can make rewrite declarations by writing RewriteRule followed by a regular expression that matches the URL you are trying to catch, followed by the URL you want to be "redirected" to, using $1, $2, ... , $n etc to match the bracketed parts of the regex respective of the order they appear in it.
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/view/([0-9]+)/?$ /view.php?cat=$1
Save that file in the root of your website. Would take http://adityasastry.in/view/666 and "redirect" to http://adityasastry.in/view.php?cat=666. I would suggest reading the article I mentioned above as it covers this practice in far greater detail.
If I understand you correctly, you could put this in your htaccess file. (assumes Apache)
DirectoryIndex view.php
See this Q&A for reference
If your site automatically goes to index.php, then you might skip this and then in index.php load whatever page/file you want with a conditional include.
None of what I am saying is intended to dispute the re-write answers, just giving alternatives.
Related
I am developing my login system a bit further to look a lot more professional, and I wanted to know how I could turn get requests into simple links so they look a lot more sleeker?
For example for one of my systems a user can search someones elses profile by going to http://www.example.com/user?user=JimmyJones
Thats all fine and dandy but I don't think it looks very good and many other websites don't have this in their links due to some kind of trick I don't know about, as you can see I have gotten rid of the .php at the end which is done using some very simple htaccess.
But how can I change that link above to:
http://www.example.com/user/JimmyJones
Thank you very much for taking your time to read this and I really hope someone can help me out with my little problem, I assume there is some way to do this in .htaccess?
EDIT:
Here are some websites that do it just about how I would like to do it:
imgur.com/user/example
facebook.com/exampleuser
you make .htaccess file in the root dictionary then start it with
RewriteEngine on
then write your rules, For your example it would be like this
RewriteRule ^/?user/([^/]+)/?$ user?user=$1 [L,QSA]
so a full page would be like this
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/?user/([^/]+)/?$ user.php?user=$1
just for your example.
In .htaccess assuming the Apache web server with the rewrite module enabled, something like this:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^user/([a-zA-Z]+)$ user.php?user=$1 [L]
The first line says use the rewrite engine.
The second, says match a url that begins (or rather is relative to the .htaccess containing folder) with the pattern 'user' followed by a slash and matching a pattern of any alphabetic characters until the end of the string (not including additional query parameters).
The L flag basically says job done.
If the .htaccess were in the public root:
//example.com/user/JimmieJones
would map to:
//example.com/user.php?user=JimmieJones
However it will not match:
//example.com/user
//example.com/user/
//example.com/user/JimmieJones/
//example.com/user/Freddy_K9
Note that any existing links in your application:
Visit Jimmie's Profile
Would likely need to be updated. And with the example pattern above, the old style urls (previously indexed/bookmarked) could fail without your existing rule. You may need to adapt the pattern or set up redirects for the old style.
Managing lots of redirects and rewrites can become a headache. I'd advice some attention to your url name spacing. And documenting them.
I reserve first level patterns for aliases/shortcuts/campaigns.
//example.com/slug
I'd avoid that for your user profile urls if possible.
You'll ideally want to aim for consistency and have one-one correspondence for URLs(with associated http method) and resources (canonical urls).
I am very new to .htaccess, I am having some problem with file action.
Example:
http://www.domain.com/upload_pic.php?action=save_pic
I wrote the .htaccess rule like
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^sabc([a-zA-Z0-9!##$-_]*)$ upload_pic.php?action=$1
I want the desired result like:
http://www.domain.com/sabc/save_pic
How can I get the desired result, please correct my .htaccess line.
Change it to:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^sabc/(.+)$ upload_pic.php?action=$1
The .+ will capture one or more characters after the / and be captured into $1
There are several other guides on the web already, but to understand it in better way as you are beginner #AMY, I have writen this for you. Hope this will work for you.
Most dynamic sites include variables in their URLs that tell the site what information to show the user. Typically, this gives URLs like the following, telling the relevant script on a site to load product number 7.
http://www.domain.com/upload_pic.php?pic_id=7
The problems with this kind of URL structure are that the URL is not at all memorable. It's difficult to read out over the phone (you'd be surprised how many people pass URLs this way). Search engines and users alike get no useful information about the content of a page from that URL. You can't tell from that URL that that page allows you to buy a Norwegian Blue Parrot (lovely plumage). It's a fairly standard URL - the sort you'd get by default from most CMSes. Compare that to this URL:
http://www.domain.com/sabc/7/
Clearly a much cleaner and shorter URL. It's much easier to remember, and vastly easier to read out. That said, it doesn't exactly tell anyone what it refers to. But we can do more:
http://www.domain.com/sabc/user-navnish/
Now we're getting somewhere. You can tell from the URL, even when it's taken out of context, what you're likely to find on that page. Search engines can split that URL into words (hyphens in URLs are treated as spaces by search engines, whereas underscores are not), and they can use that information to better determine the content of the page. It's an easy URL to remember and to pass to another person.
Unfortunately, the last URL cannot be easily understood by a server without some work on our part. When a request is made for that URL, the server needs to work out how to process that URL so that it knows what to send back to the user. URL rewriting is the technique used to "translate" a URL like the last one into something the server can understand.
To accomplish this, we need to first create a text document called ".htaccess" to contain our rules. It must be named exactly that (not ".htaccess.txt" or "rules.htaccess"). This would be placed in the root directory of the server (the same folder as "upload_pic.php" in our example). There may already be an .htaccess file there, in which case we should edit that rather than overwrite it.
RewriteEngine On # Turn on the rewriting engine
RewriteRule ^sabc/?$ upload_pic.php [NC,L] # Handle requests for "sabc"
A couple of quick items to note - everything following a hash symbol in an .htaccess file is ignored as a comment, and I'd recommend you use comments liberally; and the "RewriteEngine" line should only be used once per .htaccess file (please note that I've not included this line from here onwards in code example).
The "RewriteRule" line is where the magic happens. The line can be broken down into 5 parts:
RewriteRule - Tells Apache that this like refers to a single
RewriteRule.
^/sabc/?$ - The "pattern". The server will check the URL of every
request to the site to see if this pattern matches. If it does, then
Apache will swap the URL of the request for the "substitution"
section that follows.
upload_pic.php - The "substitution". If the pattern
above matches the request, Apache uses this URL instead of the
requested URL.
[NC,L] - "Flags", that tell Apache how to apply the rule. In this
case, we're using two flags. "NC", tells Apache that this rule should
be case-insensitive, and "L" tells Apache not to process any more
rules if this one is used.
# Handle requests for "sabc" - Comment explaining what the rule does (optional but recommended)
The rule above is a simple method for rewriting a single URL, and is the basis for almost all URL rewriting rules.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^sabc/(.+)$ upload_pic.php?action=$1
Hope this will be helpful for you to understand URL rewriting #AMY.
I've gone through a few different questions like:
Rewrite for all URLs
Can mod_rewrite convert any number of parameters with any names?
Creating dynamic URLs in htaccess
Which helped me change one set of urls from domain.com/script2.php?d=1 to domain.com/(d), but now I'm stuck with something that I can't find an answer for. Currently, I have a set of URLs that are set up as:
domain.com/script.php?a=1
While I know how to change those URLs to domain.com/(a) this doesn't quite help me with this one because variable A is just a numerical identifier, so going from domain.com/script.php?products=1 to domain.com/1 doesn't do me a lot of good.
Instead, it's variable B which is actually the descriptor, ProductName. So what I'm trying to do is have it so that rather than domain.com/(a), I can get domain.com/(b). There is a complication. The reason that the original set up used variable A is that multiple products use the same descriptor in variable B, so I also need to include variable C which differentiates them, so I need the URL to be domain.com/(b)-(c).
Bonus! Remember how I said I had another script that I'd changed from domain.com/script2.php?d=1 to domain.com/(d)? Well, it'd be super awesome if I could set up my this current script to display not as domain.com/(b)-(c) but instead as domain.com/(d)/(b)-(c) because domain/(d) is actually the search page for this other script, so it's a really logical flow and would really simplify browsing, and would let users intuitively move between the search and the products without much work.
I have no idea if this is even possible, but any help would be appreciated.
Why not just rewrite everything back to your script file?
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule .* index.php [L]
Will rewrite everything back to index.php. From there you can parse the $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] variable in PHP. From there you can decide what page to load based on the given url.
If you have any other folders in the same directory of the rewrite rule above, you can put another .htaccess file inside those that have RewriteEngine Off if you don't want them to be rewritten back to index.php. That is what you will need for a css file or site images.
Using this method, you could always do something like this.
domain.com/products/1
or, domain.com/search/blahblah
a question that I hope does not sound crazy: On a multilingual site, imagine several actual files with contents in them which are currently reachable under their file names:
website.org/en/tomato.php
website.org/nl/tomato.php
website.org/de/tomato.php
These are all one and the same php file, the folder infront of it tells the php to fetch what content. Now this name is short and handy for my file managemens, but the file names are all very unsexy for search engines. So, what are the ways to make these flat files having more exotic names like:
website.org/en/tomato.php-fist-The-Forgotten-Red-Punch
website.org/nl/tomaat.php-vuist-De-Vergeten-Rode-Vuist
website.org/de/tomate.php-faust-Die-Fergessen-Rote-Faust
Currently, my php nderstands the folder /en/ or /nl/ preceding the filenames and puts the correct language into the tomato.php file.
It is my dream to have a per language file name which then somehow tells php/apache to make it work and fetch invisibly underneath the naming engine the correct file.
I am really not ready for a cms framework, I'm happy I can manage my flat files myself. What would be a creative way to have a links management where sothat I can tags my links above the water more exoticly, while keeping the short file names below water for myself?
Solutions/ideas/suggestions/code are all very welcome and treated as possible answers and are Much appreciated.
This is very common to handle with Apache and mod_rewrite ... there are a number of ways to do this - the most common way is to rewrite all files to index.php
In .htaccess:
RewriteRule .* index.php [L]
Then in your index.php check PATH_INFO and compare against your database for the associated real file.
A few tutorials here:
http://techie-buzz.com/how-to/create-seo-friendly-urls-using-mod-rewrite-and-php-part-1.html
http://articles.sitepoint.com/article/search-engine-friendly-urls
When I go to some websites I notice that there is no file extension on the page. Actually, this site is a proper example. Anybody know how this is done? :]
This is generally accomplished with URL Rewriting (link goes to a great introductory tutorial).
In the simplest case, a rewrite rule simply redirects every address by adding ".php" (or whatever other file extension) on the end of the url. So if someone tries to visit http://www.yoursite.com/about-me, they are actually viewing the content coming from the file about-me.php.
This could also be an MVC framework. (Search here, there are lots for php, a famous one for .NET, and I am sure many frameworks for many language.
This site has a root file, lets call it index.aspx (its not, but go with me) and that file has special code to read more of the URL. Used in combination with URL rewriting as mentioned, that special file takes in what would normally be path information and treats it as variable input.
Possible to remove extentions on php pages?
is something like
https://stackoverflow.com/index.aspx/questions/778799/possible-to-remove-extentions-on-php-pages
With index.aspx being the file that is hidden via URL rewriting.. Questions is a parameter indicating the controller, 778799 being a parameter that and the other text being the final parameter. (That is ignored)
For more see
http://www.asp.net/mvc/
http://codeigniter.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-view-controller
Aside from URL rewriting, you can also change apache's configuration to support alternative file extensions allowing you to do do something like MyPHPPage.html.
Regards,
Frank
Use mod_rewrite. Just put code like this in a file called .htaccess on your root:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^([^/\.]+)/?([^/\.]+)/?$ index.php?resource_type=$1&id=$2 [QSA,L]
Notice how $1 and $2 access the two quantities in parenthesized portions of the regular expression. It seems easy to extend the code from here