Virtual directory perhaps?

[Dean C]

This is the scenario. I have my website uploaded @ www.example.com/real/ and within that .htaccess directory I have numerous rules to rewrite my URLs. For example I rewrite search.php into a search directory @ www.example.com/real/search

What I want to do is to make this directory structure completely hidden from the public within my URLs. So if I went to www.example.com/search/ it'd actually be accessing all the info from within the real/search/ directory.

Is this possible? I don't want to overcomplicate things

[dklynn]

Dean,

Sure! Just add the "real" directory via mod_rewrite.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^real/
RewriteRule ^([a-z]+)$ real/$1 [L]

USE CAUTION in this 'cause any extensionless (LOWERCASE) filename (one or more letters) will get redirected to the real directory!

Will that do it for you?

Regards,

DK

[Dean C]

I put that in my base directory (example.com) and went to example.com/search/ and it didn't work (The requested URL /search/ was not found on this server.)

[dklynn]

Dean,

Ya ditna sae ya wanted to uzz a trailing slash! Specificity, laddie, specificity!
(Apologies to any Scot reading that!)

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^real/
RewriteRule ^([a-z]+)/?$ real/$1 [L]

... should take care of your newly discovered trailing slash

Regards,

DK

[Dean C]

Hey again,

I see how it's working now and fixed it to what I needed Many thanks!

P.S. Why are you talking in Scottish lol

Cheers,
- Dean

[dklynn]

Dean,

Aw, my smart@$$ way of smacking your wrist for adding the trailing slash after you'd had the non-trailing slash answer.

So long as your problems resolved, IT'S PARTY TIME!

Regards,

DK

[Dean C]

Haha it's all good David Thanks again!

[dklynn]

Dean,

No worries, mate!

Kind of late there, isn't it? Oh, well, I'm normally online late myself. At least you can sleep easy with that problem resolved.

Regards,

DK

[Dean C]

I have a further extension question for this. Here is what I have in my .htaccess file currently:

allow from all
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^real/
RewriteRule ^([0-9A-Za-z-\/\.]+)/?$ real/$1 [L]

I need it to redirect every request at root-level to real except for an index.html file the forum directory and the news directory

[dklynn]

Dean,

Oh, my! The expert's back asking questions! We must be in trouble now!

Using your existing .htaccess to avoid index.html, forum/ and news/:

# allow from all - what's this about?

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^(real|forum|news)/?
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^index\.html$
RewriteRule ^([0-9A-Za-z-\/\.]+)/?$ real/$1 [L]

That should check for the three directories with optional trailing slash, the index.html in root then redirect everything else to the real directory.

BTW, good work and thanks for all your help in this forum!

Regards,

DK

[Dean C]

Thanks for your help again David - much appreciated! I'm no expert, just love playing with regexps

To explain the allow from all, on my localhost in the root htdocs dir I have it set to deny everyone except myself (127.0.0.1) but to over-ride that when I want to show a client something or in this case a preview of my forthcoming site, I put allow from all in a .htaccess file in a subfolder and it allows them to view it, still denying them access to anything else.

[dklynn]

Dean,

Thanks for that. I resolve that issue by using the production server in a hidden directory - i.e., not accessible except to those who are provided the URL. I don't allow ANYONE access to my test server 'cause that's my work computer. If you're less fussy than I am, that's a good way to get around the privacy problem.

Regards,

DK

[Dean C]

Whoops I'm back again Unfortunately the rule you gave me above only works for the news directory and the contents of the actual real directory.

Here is my actual directory structure:

FolderRoot
- forum
- news
- real
- .htaccess
- index.html

When I go to FolderRoot/forum it should stay there, when I go to FolderRoot/news it should stay there, and the same with index.html. But any other request e.g. FolderRoot/contact/ or FolderRoot/top-rated/ should point to the real dir At the moment it's only working for the news dir + FolderRoot/anything-else/ . The index.html and forum aren't working.

*sigh* that was hard to explain hehe

Cheers,
- Dean

[dklynn]

Dean,

Gee, that should be an all or nothing success story!

allow from all
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^(real|forum|news)/?
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^index\.html$
RewriteRule ^([0-9A-Za-z-\/\.]+)/?$ real/$1 [L]

If the URL does NOT start with real or forum or news (optional slash) AND the URL is not the root's index.html then "nearly everything" will be redirected to the real directory.

If this works for real and news (skipping the redirect), that's good. It's inexplicable that it would redirect the index.html and forum, though! You've spelled forum correctly and are not using htm (not html? - drop the "l$" from index\.html$ if you're not sure).

OUCH! Don't smack me - I really wasn't trying to insult you! Just trying to think of the possible typos that might be messing this up.

Regards,

DK

[Dean C]

I'll send you a PM in the morning david to show you this in action, providing that's ok with you of course ? It's just I don't want to post the URL in public

Edit:


Hmm, after doing an hours reading through the apache documentation to further expand my knowledge on it I understand exactly how this rewrite works and I have absolutely no idea why your rule doesn't work. It makes no sense eh. I do apologies because the rule does work for the index.html. It just screws up my CSS file location which can be fixed easy enough. So the only problem we have is the forum dir. I have no .htaccess file in the forum directory, it's definately there and as far as I my eyes can see (2.30am in the morning) i'm not typing it incorrectly. I think we have a case of the paranomal here !

Ok back again, this must be the 4th edit of this post. I made a forum directory within the real directory and the rule is somehow redirecting the request to real/forum. This just makes no sense at all

[dklynn]

Dean,

Hey! Don't you go off and sleep! That's not allowed at 4:10 in the afternoon!

Okay, if the gremlins are mucking up the works for you, let's tear the offending regex (in the RewriteCond(ition)) apart as if it were three separate conditions:

allow from all
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^real/?
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^forum/?
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^news/?
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^index\.html$
RewriteRule ^([0-9A-Za-z-\/\.]+)/?$ real/$1 [L]

What do you want to bet that this'll work?

As for your css file, remember that the redirect makes Apache think that it's in a different directory so you need the HTML base tag in your real scripts (WHAT? You haven't read that seo article I bleat about all the time for this EXACT problem?).



Thanks for reading up on regex/mod_rewrite so you know that I wasn't leading you astray. We need the experts in here that know what they're doing.

No problem with the PM with your URL - I understand fully.

Regards,

DK

[Dean C]

Hate to be the bearer of bad news but the forum dir is still pointing to real/forum lol! This makes no sense at all. PM firing your way

[dklynn]

Dean,

PM'd back at you to ask whether you tried the "split" version of the RewriteCond. Yeah, the forum didn't work but the news did. Want to try making those R=301 so we can tell where they're going?

Regards,

DK

[Dean C]

Yep I did use the split version and just tried with R=301 but I got some crap about redirection limit on the URL. So I changed it back to this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^real/?
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^forum/?
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^news/?
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^index\.html$
RewriteRule ^([0-9A-Za-z-\/\.]+)/?$ real/$1 [L]

And just to prove that the FolderRoot/forum is redirecting to FolderRoot/real/forum I've placed an index.html in the real/forum dir

P.S. I added a base tag to my index.html and the style and images are still screwed up

[dklynn]

Dean,

You KNOW that those RewriteCond(itions) should work as is but how about trying it without the carat (^) on the forum one? That should be the same thing but would also pickup anything with forum in it (and avoid the redirect).

Other than playing around with silly things like that, it's got me stumped.

Regards,

DK

[dklynn]

Dean,

WHOA! Something worked 'cause I've got your forum page up now. Did that kill all the others? Was it the carat (or was it misplaced)?

Regards,

DK

[Dean C]

Bingo, I got it

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond    %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond    %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-s
RewriteRule ^([0-9A-Za-z-\/\.]+)/?$ real/$1 [L]

[dklynn]

Dean,

Aw, that's cheating!

Gudonya for that one - I didn't even consider checking to see whether it existed as requested.

Regards,

DK

[Dean C]

Hehe yeah it is kinda cheating but it saves me a bit of hassle. I still am curious to know why the previous rule didn't work. I even tried switching the REQUEST_URI to SCRIPT_FILENAME and misc other things before ending up using the above Ah well

[dklynn]

Dean,

I just chalk it up to "one of those WinDze things" and ignore it in the hope that it'll go away by morning.

Regards,

DK