Apache - Redirect All Traffic without ModRewrite - php

Question

I'm trying to redirect all incoming requests to /index.php (except requests starting with ? like /?foo=bar)
ModRewrite could certainly solve this problem easily, but are there any other solutions?
For example I was thinking about creating a manual 404 page (in PHP) that would redirect to /index.php manually, but I'm not sure if/how this would work.
It would also be important to have the information from the original URI in index.php, e.g. when somebody is requesting domain.com/search-term then I need that information ("search-term") in index.php.

Answer 1

Interesting question. Even frameworks such as laravel will require a RewriteRule to push requests to index.php before doing any routing from within the framework itself.
I feel like to do a catch all as you are suggesting there would need to be some amount of Apache configuration changes.
your suggestion of redirecting the 404 page to index.php would work but the SEO implications id assume would be horrible. Any links to your site to any page other than index.php would give a 404 Not Found error in the HTTP headers (even though it shows index.php).
but.. with all that said, if you still want to do it that way, heres how you'd do it:
in .htaccess
ErrorDocument 404 /index.php
this will make your 404 not found page index.php
your redirect variables will be in the $_SERVER array and will be prefixed with REDIRECT_
print_r($_SERVER); from a redirect gives me (i removed any key value pairs without REDIRECT_ at the beginning):
Array
(
[REDIRECT_REQUEST_METHOD] => GET
[REDIRECT_STATUS] => 404
[REDIRECT_URL] => /blsah.html
)
so REDIRECT_URL would be what you would use to get "search-term" from domain.com/search-term
you can find a more complete list of the possible redirect variables here:
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/custom-error.html

Answer 2

You need to use some sort of routing component, such as those that exist in frameworks to handle redirect all routes. For example if you were using laravel 4 you could do something like this within the routes.php file:
Route::any('/', function(){
//Do Magic Stuff
});
Route::any('{all}', function($uri)
{
//Check query string here - redirect as necessary
if (stripos($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'], '?') !== false)
//Redirect or do stuff depending on your use case
else
Redirect::to('/'); //Otherwise redirect to your homepage
})->where('all', '.*');
The all will match all routes and redirect them to the first route which would be your default. There are plenty of php frameworks out there that you could probably do this with or could even do it from scratch - this is just one framework that I find to be great to work with.
Credit to Jason Lewis: Get all routes, Laravel 4
Laravel Routing: http://laravel.com/docs/routing