Making RewriteRule to mock reddit's or Rails? - php

Question

For fun I want to make a reddit clone in php. I have mostly java experience but know my way around php, if that matters at all. I also have very limited experince with Rails 3 and I believe how rails deals with URLs is also close to how I want to handle it.
So far in a .htaccess I have:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.+)$ /index.php/$1 [L]
This routes every page to index.php where I parse the URI and handle requests with a switch. I know this isn't scalable in the long run but I want to get off the ground.
My next stepis to add a / automaticly at the end of a URL like localhost/r/all so it becomose localhost/r/all/ I want and have tried to make a RewriteRule like:
RewriteRule ^/?(.+)$ /$1/ [R]
This gives a 500 error. I think it is because it gets stuck in an infinite loop of redirect because /$1/ will equal ^/?(.+). So I need something like:
RewriteRule ^/?(.+)Does not end in a forwardlash$ /$1/ [R]
How can I do this? I see that the ! charecter can be used to denote a condition it should not match, but I am having trouble getting this to work.
Any Advice is appreciated.
EDIT:
getenv("DOCUMENT_ROOT") //gives /var/www
I have /var/www/index.php living, well in /www.
My .htaccess file which I am making these changes to lives in /var.
I have .htaccess in /var because in my httpd.cong I have this:
<Directory /var>
AllowOverride All
</Directory>
I first tried to have it as
<Directory /var/www>
and putting .htaccess in www but it is never read. I know it is not read becuase I put garbage in it and there is no error. But, if I have garbage in it when it is in /var and the Drectory directive specifies /var I get an error.

Answer 1

Try this (untested):
# Turn mod_rewrite on, yada yada yada
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
# We'll want to do the redirect before rewriting anything
# Files obviously don't have a trailing slash, and directories require one - so
# we only need to check if the file exists
# I'm not actually sure if mod_rewrite understands non-capturing groups though
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^/?((?:.+?)[^/])$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1/ [L,R=301]
# Do the rewrite
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.+)$ /index.php/$1 [L]
I get the feeling that the problem with your attempt is likely to be the order of the rules, a missing RewriteCond on the redirect RewriteRule and/or that you didn't put a L flag in the redirect RewriteRule - but the above regexes make me happier than yours do, because they are a little more specific about what they match.
I'm not actually sure if mod_rewrite supports all the regex features I have used above, so if you continue to get an error that might be why - come back here if you do have a problem and I'll look at it more closely.