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Ryan Griggs
Asked: 2017-05-27 10:50:28 +0800 CST

.htaccess file redirects to wrong destination

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I have a LAMP stack. I'm using the following .htaccess file to automatically map requests to .php files:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^([^\.]+)$ $1.php [NC,L]

So if I browse to http://example.com/asdf the "asdf.php" file will be loaded.

However, if I create a .css file with the same name (i.e. "asdf.css"), then the server returns the css file instead of the PHP file when browsing to the name without extension. Also seems to happen for .txt file extensions, and probably any other three-character extension (although does NOT happen for .js files).

I can't understand why this is happening. My understanding of the rewrite ruleset is this: 1) if the file being requested doesn't exist THEN 2) if the filename does NOT contain a period, redirect the request to [filename].php

How can this ever return a .txt or .css file, especially when the matching .php file exists? What am I missing here?

Thanks!

php

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    If you have multiple files with the same basename, then it sounds like you may have a conflict with MultiViews. Try disabling this in your .htaccess file (or server config):

    Options -MultiViews

    MultiViews (part of mod_negotiation) does the same sort of thing you are trying to do with mod_rewrite and I suspect is "winning". When you request /asdf and asdf maps to a file basename then MultiViews attempts to serve an appropriate file that would match the intended mime-type (which may explain why .js files get missed).

    My understanding of the rewrite ruleset is this: 1) if the file being requested doesn't exist THEN 2) if the filename does NOT contain a period, redirect the request to [filename].php

    Otherwise, your understanding of the mod_rewrite directives is pretty much correct, except the order is the other way round (the RewriteRule pattern is processed first)...

    1. If the URL (the entire URL that is) does not contain a period.
    2. And the request does not map to a valid file (unlikely if all your files have file extensions - so this condition could perhaps be omitted).
    3. Internally rewrite the request by appending a .php extension.
    RewriteRule ^([^\.]+)$ $1.php [NC,L]

    There's no need to escape a literal period in a character class, and the NC flag is superfluous here.

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