Rewrite pagerequests to index.php, filerequests to app/webroot directory - php

Question

Hey, I've been reading StackOverflow.com for a long time but decided to sign up to ask a question. I'm writing my own lightweight MVC framework that routes page requests in index.php.
Page requests look like /controller/action/arg1/arg2/arg3, and they should be rewritten to index.php?route=[request]. So, a [request] like site.com/user/profile/123 should be rewritten to index.php?route=user/profile/123
However, files aren't meant to rewrite to index.php. Assets such as images and stylesheets are in the /app/webroot/ folder, and don't need PHP to be executed. So, the mod_rewrite engine should rewrite any filerequests to /app/webroot/, and serve the configured 404 ErrorDocument when the file doesn't exist.
Directory structure
./index.php
./app/webroot/scripts/helpers/hamster.js
./app/webroot/images/logo.png
./app/webroot/style/main.css
Since you can tell the difference between a file request (/squirrel.png) and a page request (/user/profile/123) just by the existence of the file extension / dot, I was expecting that this would be really easy. But... I'm having a really hard time with it and I was hoping someone could help me out.
Something I've tried was...
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ app/webroot/$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?route=$1 [QSA,L]
... but it doesn't really work except for redirecting correctly to existing files. Pagerequests or nonexisting files result in HTTP 500 errors.
Any help is greatly appreciated! =)

Answer 1

See if this works out a little more like you expected:
RewriteEngine On
# These two lines are very specific to your current setup, to prevent
# mod_dir from doing what it does, but in a more controlled way
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]+\s/iceberg[^/]
RewriteRule .* http://localhost/iceberg/ [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/app/webroot
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} \.[a-z]+$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^.*$ app/webroot/$0 [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/app/webroot
RewriteRule ^.*$ index.php?route=$0 [QSA,L]
Also, to explain, the reason why you are getting the 500 error is likely because of your rule:
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?route=$1 [QSA,L]
Since it's unconditional, and the regular expression pattern will always match, your rewrite will be performed over and over (the L flag doesn't prevent this, because after you rewrite to index.php, an internal redirection is made inside of Apache, and the process loses its current state).