Explanation of RewriteRule parameters in Apache

1 year ago
Ava Mitchell
2 minutes

In Apache, RewriteRule is a directive used to rewrite URLs. It allows you to rewrite one URL to another based on specific rules. The RewriteRule directive has several parameters.

  1. URL pattern: the pattern to be matched. It can be a simple string or a regular expression. Various pattern matching symbols can be used, such as *, ?, and +.
  2. Substitution: The URL that you want to replace. It can be a relative path or a complete URL. You can use backreferences ($1, $2, etc.) to refer to captured groups in the pattern.
  3. Flags: Options flags used to specify the behavior of RewriteRule. Multiple flags can be used, separated by commas. Some common flags include:
  4. [L]: Stop processing the following RewriteRule directives.
  5. [R]：Perform an external redirect to send the URL to the client’s browser.
  6. [F]: Receive a 403 Forbidden error.
  7. [QSA]: Preserve the query string while rewriting the URL.
  8. [NC]: Case-insensitive matching.
  9. Do not encode the URL.
  10. Condition: An expression used for performing a condition check before executing the RewriteRule. Multiple conditions can be used and combined with [OR] and [AND].

Here is an example syntax of RewriteRule:

RewriteRule pattern substitution [flags]

Here is an example:

RewriteRule ^products/([0-9]+)/?$ /product.php?id=$1 [L]

This rule will match URLs starting with /products/ followed by one or more numbers, and rewrite them to the form /product.php?id=xx. The [L] flag indicates to stop processing further RewriteRule instructions.

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