mod_rewrite changing address bar for no reason

Question

I have an .htaccess file and when ever i type www.example.com/demo/index.php it keeps redirected me in a loop. I'm really confused as to why this is happening.

# Do not remove this line, otherwise mod_rewrite rules will stop working

RewriteBase /

Options +Multiviews

AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .css

AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .js

RewriteEngine On


#NC not case sensitive
#L last rule don't process futher
#R 301 changes the url to what you want

RewriteRule ^demo(.*)$ finished$1 [NC]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/finished/.*$
RewriteRule ^finished/(.*)$ demo/$1 [NC,R=301,L]

Answer 1

I can see the rewrite loop happening if you are doing:

http://mydomain/demo/rewrite.cgi

because that will get rewritten by the first rule to

http://mydomain/finished/rewrite.cgi

And then that matches the rewrite condition of the second rewrite rule and gets rewritten to:

http://mydomain/demo/rewrite.cgi

and your loop starts.

There's probably two fixes here either a) add the L flag to the first rewrite rule (makes it the last rewrite that will happen) or b) if your demo rewrite not followed by a slash I'd make that implicit:

RewriteRule ^demo([^/]+)$ finished$1 [NC]

The other option if that's not the cause, it to turn on rewrite rule logging and look at what is being done to create the loop:

RewriteLog /path/to/rewrite.log
RewriteLogLevel 3