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Andyj12
Asked: 2019-12-29 02:22:36 +0800 CST

Using .htaccess for version control

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I am developing a website, and I want to keep the live and some development code on the site. I was thinking of using .htaccess to allow me to develop new code, and then cut over to the new version when ready. Is this a stupid idea? and what's wrong with my .htaccess?

So, I have directories v1.1 and v1.2 in my web root. and this is my .htaccess file:

#########################

RewriteEngine On

RewriteRule ^live/(.*)$     v1.1/$1 [L]
Redirect 301 /live$ http://blah.com/live/

RewriteRule ^debug/(.*)$    v1.2/$1 [L]

# Disable directory browsing
Options All -Indexes

# Deny access to all .htaccess files
<files ~ "^.*\.([Hh][Tt][Aa])">
order allow,deny
deny from all
satisfy all
</files>

I've got this to work, and it allows example.com/live/ to show the code in v1.1 and example.com/debug to let me play with the code in v1.2.

There are 2 issues with this:

  1. The user sees the word /live/ in the URL and may go digging...
  2. I can't get the .htaccess file to redirect example.com/ to v1.1/

I would prefer to have example.com/<almost anything> to go to example.com/v1.1/
and example.com/debug/<anything> to go to example.com/v1.2/.

I tried...

RewriteRule ^$     v1.1/ [L]

and 

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ v1.1/$1 [L]

but these did not work... (Internal Server Error).

I had a play with this excellent tool - https://htaccess.madewithlove.be/ - which seems to think my htaccess file is great (when obviously its not)

.htaccess

2 Answers

  1. You can achieve this behaviour without any RewriteRules by using symbolic links. If your DocumentRoot points to /var/www/html, you could move your versioned directories v1.1 and v2.2 to /var/www

    root@www:/var/www# ls -l
total 0
drwxrwsr-x 1 www-data www-data 512 Dec 28 12:30 v1.1
drwxrwsr-x 1 www-data www-data 512 Dec 28 12:31 v1.2

    and symlink v1.1 to html

    ln -s v1.1 html

    Your live-version now points to v1.1.

    Then symlink v1.2 inside v1.1 as debug

    cd v1.1
ln -s ../v1.2 debug

    You should then add some kind of access protection (password / ip address) to your development version.

    When you're done with developing and want to switch to the new version, remove both symlinks and create new symlinks to the new live and development version.

    You might need to enable FollowSymLinks if this option is disabled in your Apache config / .htaccess (default is enabled).

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  2. I would prefer to have example.com/<almost anything> to go to example.com/v1.1/ and example.com/debug/<anything> to go to example.com/v1.2/

    Yes, this would certainly be preferable. (Also consider using a debug subdomain instead and keep the same URL-path for the "live" and "debug" versions.)

    Try the following instead:

    # Rewrite the "live" site
RewriteRule !^(v\d\.\d|debug)/ /v1.1%{REQUEST_URI} [L]

# Rewrite the "debug" site
RewriteRule ^debug/(.*) /v1.2/$1 [L]

    The RewriteRule pattern !^(v\d\.\d|debug)/ ensures we do not rewrite requests that already start /vN.N/ (where N is a digit 0-9), or those that start /debug/. This is to avoid a rewrite loop, after rewriting the request to /v1.1/... or /v1.2/....

    Note, however, that /v1.1/... and /v1.2/... are still directly accessible. You don't necessarily need to redirect these, unless these have previously been publicly accessible (and indexed / linked to by third parties).

    Aside...

    Redirect 301 /live$ http://blah.com/live/

    This won't actually do anything. The Redirect directive does not take a regex as its second argument, so /live$ will never match (unless maybe you have a literal $ in your URL).

    Note also that Redirect is a mod_alias directive. RewriteRule is mod_rewrite. You should avoid mixing redirects/rewrites from both modules as you can get unexpected results. (Different modules run at different times throughout the request, not necessarily in the order of the directives in your config file. On Apache mod_rewrite runs first.)

    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ v1.1/$1 [L]

    This will result in an internal rewrite loop as v1.1/... will be rewritten repeatedly. This manifests itself as an HTTP 500 (Internal Server Error) response returned to the client when the internal redirection limit is reached (default 10 loops). See your server's error log for the details of the error.

    By itself, RewriteRule ^$ v1.1/ [L] should not have resulted in such an error.

    # Deny access to all .htaccess files
<files ~ "^.*\.([Hh][Tt][Aa])">
order allow,deny
deny from all
satisfy all
</files>

    This does more than block .htaccess files, as it also matches files of the form <anything>.hta<anything>.

    order and deny are Apache 2.2 directives. If you are on Apache 2.4+ (which is more likely) then you should be using Require all denied instead (the older Apache 2.2 directives are deprecated).

    However, .htaccess files should already be blocked by your server config, so this may be unnecessary anyway.

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